Crayola Clan Blog

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.

Pros

• It's very different from your typical MMORPG.
• The graphics are way cool, and pretty fast even on my pitiful GeForce 7600.
• It's actually massive -- all the players are all together on one server, like the good old days.
• Skills train even while offline.
• The market is very cool.

Cons

• The learning curve is pretty steep for a game.  It's not insurmountable, just don't expect to jump right in and have any clue what to do.  Do not skip the tutorial and read the banter in the "rookie help" chat channel -- there are actually quite a few helpful people in there (not to mention quite a few of the usual assortment of MMO dorks).
• Downtime!  It takes sooooo long to navigate between planets and solar systems.  It's like taking a WoW flight to go everywhere.  At first, it's cool to look at the pretty graphics while your Autopilot warps you around, but after the first few jumps it gets pretty tiresome.
• More downtime!  Fixed times to train skills, manufacture items and research technology means a whole lot of killing time while waiting for tasks to finish.
• I started an alt to try a different character, tried to train a skill, and it told me I couldn't because another character on my account was already training a skill!  (I left my other character training something that took over 24 hours so I could upgrade my ship.)  Only one character per account can train skills at a time?!?  That's beyond ridiculous.  I'd like to think that's just a limitation of the trial account but this forum thread confirms it's not just me.
• There's a staggering number of overlapping windows to manage in the interface.
• The font size is microscopic when you run at high resolutions, which is basically a requirement because of the aforementioned overlapping windows.

I'm not sure there's enough interesting things to do in this game to keep me beyond the free trial (or even to the end of the free trial).  In fact, it seems like once you finish all the missions from your first Agent, there's nothing to do except mining.  And mining in this game is about as tedious as you can get, at least at the newbie levels.  You have to warp out to an asteroid belt, find and motor over to an asteroid, zap it with your mining laser for what seems like hours even just to fill your tiny, tiny newbie cargo bay, then warp back to the station to move the ore to your "bank" before you can refine it.  It gets faster as you buy enhancements for your ship, but at no point does it become fun.  Agent missions are far more entertaining, but after the first series, the game doesn't lead you to any more -- you have to find them on your own, which is a rather daunting task.

Because of all the downtime, the only sensible way to play this game would be to setup a dedicated computer for it.  That way you can continue to work on your main computer, and only occasionally glance at the EVE screen to see if it's finished whatever task you started.  (Right now, for example, I'm training skills in the background while I get caught up on blog posts.)  Otherwise, you'll find yourself staring blankly at the screen as hours of your life disappear... sort of like watching cable news channels during the day.

P.S. Don't be one of those dorks expecting EVE to be a precise scientific simulation of astrophysics.  Yes, you can warp through planets and no there's no gravity.  I saw somebody even complaining about the lack of "blue shift."  Sheesh.

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.

All it would take is one simple change to make it better:  Allow the player to "pre-load" the soil, water, and nutrients by dragging them over any time before they are needed.  You're welcome, Mythic designers.

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.

To wrap things up, my witch hunter got to level 20 and bought a horse (which is basically the halfway point since there's a level 40 cap), and the game did not become even a tiny bit more fun.  In fact it kept getting worse, because the higher your level gets, the faster you run out of quests and the more grinding you have to do.  And you can forget about gaining experience by going into scenarios:  Even if that was a fun thing to do, I wasn't able to get into a scenario for days on a low population server.  I didn't time it exactly, but I must have been in queues for well over an hour without any response.  By that point, I'd have to log out or switch characters to relieve the boredom.

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.

• I'm starting to notice some repetition in the gameplay at level 15-17.  I find myself grinding on the stage 1 public quests quite a lot in order to build up influence points to get the cool influence rewards.  It's not very fun.  But it's the only way to do it because you hardly ever find any groups doing public quests.
• I actually started leveling an Ironbreaker (a dwarf tank) just to mitigate some of the above tedium.  Ironbreakers are a completely different animal from witch hunters.  For one thing, combat is really, really drawn out.  This is because tanks are designed to stand there all day in the middle of a melee and draw the attacks of all the bad guys away from the soft, vulnerable spell-casters, but to balance out their relative invulnerability, they don't have a lot of damage potential.  So when you're solo, it takes quite a while to kill mobs.  Everything turns into an epic battle.
• But back to the witch hunter.  At level 16, I suddenly started to notice that I was picking up a lot of gear that required level 17 and 18 to use.  Even some of the quest rewards were above my level.  I think it's because I ended up in a slightly higher level area than I'm supposed to be for level 16.  But my guy doesn't have any trouble finishing quests with mobs of level 19-20 so I didn't really notice.  I don't know if it's because witch hunters are super powerful or if I'm just lucky a lot.
• It also seems like I'm finding a lot more gear for other classes now.  Through levels 1-10, it seemed like almost everything I picked up was something I could use immediately.  Not so much anymore.  I've had the same sword and pistol for like 5 levels now, and my bank is filling up with gear I can't use.
• I'm up over 20 gold, so I should be able to easily afford a horse when I get to level 20.
• My scavenging skill level is up over 100, but I have no idea what the effect of a higher skill level is.  I've never not been able to scavenge a corpse.  I suppose I'm getting better and/or more useful crafting supplies from it, but I wouldn't swear to it.
• Speaking of which, I finally figured out (by reading a web site heh) that if you use two cloudy waters when making potions, the stability meter goes up to maximum and they don't fail.  Once I found that out I was finally able to start making potions from the crafting stuff I scavenged from corpses, so my apothecary skill is finally moving up.  Maybe one day I'll be able to make useful healing potions, because you don't find them very often.  (On the other hand, I find entirely too many potions to restore action points, which I never need.  I'm carrying like 40 of them now.)
• The Tier 2 Stonetroll Crossing scenario is not very fun to play (as opposed to the Tier 1 Nordenwatch scenario).  On Grimnir, there just aren't many people on the Order side who seem to "get" the concept of capture the flag.  They mostly just run around in a group looking for a fight, while a handful of coordinated Destruction players stroll around the sides with the flag and win the games by like 500-2 in a couple of minutes.  Fortunately, you get renown points just for participating.  But it's just not very fun to be the only person with any kind of situational awareness.  Unfortunately since I'm a witch hunter there's no way I'm going to pick up the flag... it doesn't take a lot to kill a witch hunter, especially with the entire Destruction team on you.  (The flag carrier should be a tank or maybe a healer to have even a small chance of a solo capture.)  And for the privilege of getting spanked in this scenario you usually have to wait for like 20-30 minutes in a queue before getting in (presumably waiting for enough Order players to arrive, since Destruction outnumbers Order by 2:1 on Grimnir, as on most servers).
• As far as I can tell there are not very many Order players on Grimnir participating in RvR battlefields.  Destruction controls everything in the Empire vs. Chaos areas, and I never see any Order groups in the RvR areas of Troll Country.  Just a few people here and there probably doing the same thing I'm doing -- fulfilling quests in RvR territory.  Certainly nobody trying to actually reclaim the battlefield objectives.  It's sad because I don't think it would take very much effort to take them -- I never see any Destruction players defending the objectives; it's all NPC guards.
• Every now and then I see an animated marquee square on the map... I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.  Is that where a bunch of people are fighting?  It'd be nice if you could mouse over it and see an explanation.
• I can't find the "doctor's plagued cache" anywhere in Wolfenburg!  I've been through that silly town like 20 times and I still can't find it, even though there are tons of boxes and carts around the area.  It's got to be a bug.
• I got a WAR add-on called SpamMeNot.  I've been getting gold and leveling service spam (only $299 to level your char to 40!) approximately once every 5 minutes, and every day it was a new random name sending the tells.  It just got to be too much work to put all of them on ignore.  (Also I think there's a bug in ignore because I still got tells from people I was supposed to be ignoring.)  Anyway since I installed SpamMeNot yesterday I haven't gotten a single spam.  It's been so effective that I'm actually suspicious:  It's not saying that it's blocking any spam; they aren't sending them to me anymore.  Almost as if the gold seller somehow knows I have this thing installed and stopped sending because of it.  Curious.  Anyway I removed it again to see if the spam starts up again.  Hopefully it's completely innocent and Mythic coincidentally blocked this guy's IP at the same time I installed SpamMeNot.  I'd hate to think the gold sellers had infilitrated the WAR add-on community already.

And finally, a few words on Need vs. Greed rolls.  If you're in a group, and anyone loots an item, each person is shown the item and asked whether it's something they need ("need") or something they want ("greed").  You can also "pass" if you don't need or want it at all.  The game will give the item first to someone who chose "need," otherwise it will give it to someone who chose "greed."  I believe this is (yet another) concept taken from WoW.  Theoretically, if the item is something your character needs and can use, you click on "need."  If it's something your character can use in the future or maybe one of your alts can use it, you click on "greed."  Otherwise you click on "pass."

Now I didn't play a lot of WoW, and certainly not much in groups, but even I can tell you that this is a horrible, horrible system of loot distribution and it defies explanation why Mythic carried it over into WAR.  The vast majority of humans are going to act like pricks if given an opportunity, so almost everyone automatically clicks "need" on everything whether they need it or not, so they have the highest chance of getting the item.  If it's not something their character can actually use, they'll give it to an alt or guildmate or sell it in an auction.

Tobold had a good idea for one solution -- automatically bind items to players who select "need."  That way they have no choice but to either equip it or sell it to a merchant.  I think that's a great idea, but I think it would be even better if they simply gave the loot to a random person in the group without any choice.  Mainly because it's incredibly annoying to have to stop and examine an item and then click a "need" or "greed" button when you're in the middle of a fight.

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.)

Altdorf, however, was a gigantic wasteland of missing content and missing players.  I ran across maybe four or five others while I was there, each of which seemed to have the same puzzled expression -- where is everyone?  You can run around the streets and look at all kinds of buildings, but you can only enter a handful of them.  And even if you could go into a building, most of the time there was nothing to do there.  There were NPCs everywhere, but hardly any of them talk or give out quests.  Maybe it will blossom into something better at later levels, but at level 12, it was definitely not worth the visit.

There are a handful of unique vendors there, though:  The horse vendor, the last name registrar (whatever that is), the guild registrar and a bunch of librarians.  So at least I know where to go now when I'm ready to buy a horse.  Also, the auction house was there, but there was nothing useful for my character to buy.

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.

I found some server population statistics on the TribalWar forums:  Grimnir only has 222 (guilded) Order players!  No wonder I hardly ever ran into anyone doing the public quests.  I might need to change servers or something.

If you look at the highest populations on that list, it only comes out to around 6,000 players per server, undoubtedly only a fraction of which are actually playing at any given time.  Whatever happened to the days when massively multiplayer games were, you know, massive?  It seems to me that Asheron's Call and Ultima Online had gazillions of players all on the same server at the same time, and the towns were all choked with people.

In that same vein, it seems that the worlds of WoW and WAR (in terms of physical dimensions) are quite a bit smaller than MMOs back in the day.  In Asheron's Call and Ultima Online, it took forever to run across the world.  The world was huge!  One might even say massive.  I used to have great fun picking a direction and running as far as I could -- it was always an adventure in AC because you had to be careful about getting bogged down with too much loot.  But in WoW and WAR, they have compressed the terrain into much smaller areas.  You can almost see the next village on the horizon from the village you're currently in.

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.)

• Bottom Line.  If you're sick to death of WoW gameplay, you won't find anything significantly new in WAR.  It's just different models and scenery and lore.  Fortunately for me, I only played WoW for about 2 months (out of its unbelievable 4 year lifespan).
• Classes.  There's an eclectic mixture of classes, most of which don't seem to fit into the traditional RPG class categories.  I'm having a lot of fun with the witch hunter class (a "melee DPS" class), although it's getting to be more of a struggle at level 11.
• Public Quests.  This is the best feature of the game so far, IMO.  They are broken into three "stages."  To take part, all you have to do is wander into a PQ area and do what it says in the upper-right corner of the screen (usually kill a bunch of mobs).  You get "influence" points by taking part, and if you collect enough points you get to pick out some cool gear and additional quests from a vendor.  You don't even have to be in a group or anything.  In fact you can usually finish off the first stage of public quests solo.  But once it moves on to the second or third stage, you have to have help because you typically face "champion" mobs that take a coordinated group effort to kill.  When the third stage of the quest is finished, everyone who participated (significantly) gets a chance at some cool loot.  Unfortunately, due to the population issue below, you don't run across very many people actually doing the public quests.
• PvE.  A lot of people are saying Mythic spent all their time on PvP and didn't flesh out the PvE, but I find that's not the case at all.  There's plenty of quests to do in PvE, at least through level 11 -- in fact there's a lot more quests available than you really need.  Admittedly there's not much of a storyline, but that's true in almost every RPG game I've ever seen.  Just like WoW, you end up skimming through the badly written quest text to the part where it says what you really need to do.  (They spend so much money on production values for these games now you'd think they could afford to hire a real wordsmith to put some interesting text in those quest dialogs.)
• Scenarios.  Very similar (by which I mean basically identical) to WoW battlegrounds, but easier to access.  They are kind of fun, but they're awfully chaotic.  I don't know how everyone else does PvP, but for me it's just a lot of mad button-mashing on the keyboard and out-of-control circle-strafing.  You really can't see anything that's going on when you're in the middle of a group of 20 people fighting it out (at least I can't).  I just try to stay close to the group, use "target closest enemy" a lot, and somehow I get experience points out of it.
• RvR.  RvR (realm vs. realm) is supposed to be the biggest feature of WAR.  Unfortunately it's something you really need a group or guild to enjoy so I can't give it much of a fair review.  Whenever I wander into the open RvR areas (to fulfill quests) I get ganked by somebody who clearly has a lot more PvP experience than me, so I run like a screaming little girl from 1-on-1 encounters (not that that helps -- you might as well stand and fight).
• Bugs.  There are some glitches here and there with mob positioning (sometimes mobs will just disappear), but that's not a big deal.  There is one major bug though when you select influence rewards -- sometimes the items never appear in your backpack, which really sucks.  Yesterday I purposefully ground on stage 1 public quest mobs to get my influence up to the highest level so I could get a nice sword and armor, and the gear just vanished.  And of course the vendor wouldn't give me the stuff again.  Not cool.  Maybe it's just the beta client.
• Lag.  There is some, but I haven't been killed because of it so it's no big deal.
• Grinding.  Thankfully, there isn't much.  Those annoying quests where you have to get 5 things from mobs but they only drop the thing 1% of the time are entirely gone.  When you get a quest to kill 5 things, you go out and kill 5 things and come back, period.  It rocks.  (So far all of the quests are to kill things or find things, by the way.  No escort quests.)
• Mobs.  Unlike WoW, you can actually survive if you're unexpectedly jumped by 2 or 3 mobs.  I hated that about WoW.
• Population.  On Grimnir, I hardly ever run into anyone else competing for the same quests, and most of the public quests are actually empty.  Wait times for scenarios are tolerable.  Sometimes there's no waiting at all.
• Running.  There are times when you need to do an annoying amount of running back and forth (at least in Norsca) to turn in quests, but for the most part it's minimal.  You have to go to a flight master to get from one realm to another; you can't just run there.
• Backpack.  It's too small, as usual.  It gets filled up with crafting supplies very fast.  You automatically get more space every 10 levels, but I haven't seen where you can buy any larger packs or anything, and I haven't found a bank yet.  On the plus side, the backpack "filter" options are very cool.  It lets you automatically put certain types of items into different packs.
• Gold.  There is definitely no shortage of money.  You can easily afford to buy the best stuff at merchants.  So yeah, don't waste your money with Korean gold farmers (and yes I've seen in-game ads for that already).
• Gathering.  I picked "scavenging" as my gathering skill and so far I'm not sure it's worth it.  Basically it lets you pick up extra crafting supplies from corpses, but I haven't been able to actually do much with the supplies except sell them.
• Crafting.  I picked "apothecary" as my crafting skill and up to about skill level 35 I haven't been able to make anything useful.  You pick up far better potions as loot.  I'm not sure, but I think you can re-train your gathering and crafting skills if you change your mind, which is cool.  Crafting is an area of the game that needs work -- you get the impression that the game designers spent more time thinking about PvP than crafting.
• Death.  There's basicallly no penalty for dying as far as I can tell, except for the time it takes to run back to where you died.  (And you don't even need to do that in PvE.)  You don't lose experience, you don't lose items, and you don't become a ghost.  There's a small, cumulative penalty on your total hit points for about 15 minutes, but there's always a healer NPC right there where you respawn that will remove the penalty for a microscopic fee.

Here's my witch hunter Otteinmed (yes, a random name).  The picture is not at all representative of the in-game character.  In the game he actually looks a lot like NBC Political Director Chuck Todd.

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.

I'm trying to keep my expectations pretty low since the hype surrounding this game is pretty unbelievable, but here are a few of my initial impressions:

• I picked Grimnir, a Core rules server which, at the time, had Low populations of Order and Destruction.  I rolled three Order characters, and got one of them to level 2, for a grand total of maybe 1 hour of playing time.  I only played PvE quests; I didn't try any PvP stuff.
• I didn't experience any lag or connection problems, except for about 15 minutes where the account authentication server was down.  By game launch standards, that's pretty good.
• There is no doubt that this is an evolutionary game, not a revolutionary game.  The gameplay appears to be entirely derived from previous MMO games (*cough* WoW *cough*).  Graphics and animations are very similar to other MMO games (*cough* WoW *cough*).  The jumping and falling animation, as one example, is the exact same one we've been seeing since Asheron's Call, where your guy splays out his arms and legs in a DaVinci-style Vitruvian Man pose.
• There's a curious amount of "inside baseball" information in the game.  For example, when choosing your class, it says "tank" or "melee DPS" or "ranged DPS" right there in the character description, which obviously is not the terminology you'd expect to see used by characters in the game world.  It's like the Warhammer lore is just a thin varnish over an otherwise generic MMO engine.
• Combat is like WoW in that you have to click on your special action buttons in order to do real damage, otherwise you'll be doing minimal damage with the default attacks and the fight will drag out forever.  However it is different from WoW in that your special actions don't consume much of your action bar... you can keep clicking on your special action over and over and over again and not lose more than a third of your action bar (at level 1, at least).  It takes about 3-4 special attack hits to kill people at level 1.
• Side note:  Is it really necessary for us to pick the eye color of our characters?  I mean, seriously, it's like 2 pixels worth of information, and besides you only get to look at your character's back during the game anyway.  Seems like a wasted effort.
• On the guild front, I found out that you have to collect together a group of six unguilded players before you can register your guild.  Oh well.  Maybe I'll start a web page anyway and just pretend like it's a guild.  Yeah, that sounds pretty sane.
• Player behavior is relatively innocuous so far, with one exception:  One guy came up to me while I was trying to get a new spell from a vendor, and he's all trying to chat and stuff.  "Hello."  "Hello?"  "Helloooo????"  What the hell is wrong with people?  I'm trying to play a game here!  I don't have all night to sit around chatting with needy, attention-starved people or guild trolls.  I need a macro for those kinds of situations.  "No time to talk!  Small window of playing time!  Thx bye!"

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.)

I wasn't going to buy it because I don't know anybody else that's playing it -- but it occurred to me that that was probably the best reason to go ahead and get it.  Traditionally (in WoW, at least, which I presume is now the de facto standard gameplay for MMOs), if you try to do everything solo, it becomes frustrating because the game designers expect you to perform every task with a balanced group of anywhere from 2 to 50 friends.  That makes a lot of quests (especially the dreaded "escort" quests) basically impossible to complete by yourself, so after a short time you lose interest and stop playing.  That works out perfectly for MMOs because the goal is to get sick of the game within the first month of free gameplay.

I'll keep you informed about what server I end up on.  My goal is to start a "people who don't play enough to be in a guild" guild. :)  Assuming it doesn't have some ridiculous charter you have to get signed by 10 people like WoW did.

* Actually, since I pre-ordered (by about 2 days), I got a "headstart" key so I'm able to download a game client from FilePlanet.  FilePlanet has a two-tier downloading caste system, where paying customers get to download files immediately, while the rest of us peasants get to wait in queues for the leftover bandwidth.  I am currently in a 60 minute queue waiting for the client download to begin.

Is anyone I know going to be playing WarHammer Online?  I see it's going to be released pretty soon (Sep 18).  If anyone I know is planning to play it, I'll probably pre-order it, otherwise I'll probably wait a year for a free trial version to come with a video card (like I did with World of Warcraft heh).  Send me a comment or an email or something.

I installed Gears of War for the PC this past weekend.  I bought it about six months ago... and only now experienced just the right combination of boredom and lack of creativity to turn to a video game.

Like any modern game, it took almost the entire afternoon to install.  Then it crashed when I tried to run it.  Per the usual routine, I downloaded the latest drivers and made sure I had the latest version of DirectX installed.  It still didn't work.  It turned out I had to create a new user account with Administrator privileges to run it.  This was on Vista by the way (it's only the second game I've tried on Vista).  Curiously, neither game installed any icons on the Start menu.  Even re-installing under the administrator account didn't install any shortcuts.  I just made my own.

I've only played for a handful of hours, but so far I like it.  It's different from the usual first person shooter because, well, for one thing, it's a third person shooter.  The over-the-shoulder view is pretty cool, and it doesn't detract from shooting accuracy because when you press the aim key and fire, it zooms into a more first-person view.  And I really like the emphasis on cover... it makes the strategy different from any other shooter I've played, which gives it a fresh new feel.

On the negative side, checkpoints blow.  I've never liked them and I still don't.  It's no fun to repeat a section of the game you've already finished if you die right at the end (and in this game, there are usually about 3 little mini-encounters per checkpoint, and they are always progressively harder, so you are more likely to die at the end than the beginning).  Games should always have a load and save feature.  Admittedly, this might be a consequence of the game's Xbox lineage... but still, it's a PC game now.  Put some effort into it.

On the aesthetic side, will there ever be a time when shooters aren't stealing from the movie Aliens?  And does it have to be an elite squad of steroid-juicing soldiers with an enormous flat-headed black guy every time?  I would think, considering the U.S. Army's continuing reliance on remote robot technology, that soldiers of the future would actually be more like the local chess nerd than The Hulk.

My video card is pretty dated for modern games (it's an Nvidia 7800GT), so I have to run in 960x600 with a lot of options turned off to get decent performance.  Still, GoW looks pretty nice.  (Hey, I used to play games in 512x384 with no effects at all... and it snowed all the time... and we had to walk uphill... both ways...)  I can run at 1280x720 (the nominal resolution of the Xbox 360) which looks much better, but it gets too glitchy... I'll sacrifice visual glamor for performance any day.

Game Controller Experiment

I wanted to try an experiment with GoW.  Because of the aforementioned dated video card, lately I've been thinking about getting an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 instead of upgrading my computer.  The price would be roughly the same.  The main thing that holds me back is that most of the games I like to play -- FPS, RTS, RPG -- tend to work better with higher resolutions and a mouse/keyboard interface.  The higher resolution is not so much of a problem anymore, but I've never been able to see myself playing a shooter with what I imagine to be the limited precision of a game controller.  And for some completely mystifying reason, apparently nobody has yet invented a keyboard/mouse controller for game consoles.

So I thought I'd try to play GoW with a Logitech game controller I've had sitting around forever.  If I could make it work and have a reasonably enjoyable experience, then I would feel better about moving over to a game console.

Let's just say my initial attempts have been comical.

Maybe it's the controller.  GoW is designed for an Xbox controller, but I'm using a cheap Logitech controller.  The default configuration has the left analog stick controlling movement and the right analog stick controlling your viewpoint.  But I can't seem to get it configured so that moving the analog stick forward moves the guy forward... it's always reversed.  So when I move the stick forward, my guy runs backward into a wall.  I can tell you right now there's no way I'm going to try to get used to having to pull backwards to move forward.  And why am I using a stick for movement anyway?  Wouldn't the D-pad work better for movement?  It's crazed I tell you.  No wonder kids today are so screwed up.

Google Not Much Help

So naturally I turned to Google for information about fixing my controller configuration.  Every game in the universe has cryptic commands you can put into an autoexec.cfg file to tweak the game settings to your liking.  It's yet another feature that id Software invented in Quake oh-so-long ago that everyone has mindlessly copied ever since.

Unfortunately, Google is almost no help to me.  You young kids may not know this, but there used to be a time when you could look up console commands for a game without being subjected to 50,000,000 pages of cheat codes, "first look" game reviews and idiotic "help I can't make it go" (followed by "stfu you stupid noob") forum posts.  Those days are apparently long gone.  Google should really look into improving the signal-to-noise ratio for game-related searches.  In the meantime, I guess I'll keep hitting the "Next" link, hoping someday to stumble over some real information.

At any rate, I tried for several hours to make the controller work and I finally gave up and went back to the mouse.  I guess I won't be getting a console after all.

I deleted some comment spam tonight, which reminded me that I haven't posted anything about gaming in a while, which is probably because I haven't played anything much since I quit CoD4.  I couldn't get into Team Fortress 2 even though it was kind of fun for a couple weeks.  I recently bought Neverwinter Nights 2, which I played for a little while but I got bored and distracted by other activities.  I also bought a copy of Gears of War for the PC but I haven't installed it yet.  Probably will need a computer upgrade before I do.  About a month ago, I reformatted what used to be my Windows XP gaming PC and now use it as a domain controller, so I'll need to install all my future games on my Vista PC.  I hope it works. :)

I probably shouldn't be rewarding this kind of annoying pub server behavior, but Team Roomba's "More Team Fortress 2 Griefing" YouTube video might just be the funniest thing I've ever seen, especially at the end with the trivia questions. (Warning: I wouldn't recommend watching with minors present.)

So I picked up Valve's Orange Box, which includes Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and some other mini-games that nobody cares about. I got Orange Box for basically three reasons: 1) I wanted to play HL2 Episode 2, the continuation of the Half-Life 2 serial saga, 2) I've heard a lot of good things about Portal, and 3) I enjoyed the amusing TF2 trailers, plus Yellow said he'd played it, which I assume means it can't be all that bad. In any case it's a good value for three games, and it's downloadable so I didn't even have to leave my chair. (That part kinda rules.)

Thusfar I have only played Portal. I can confirm that the rumors are true: Portal really is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's the most inventive use of a first-person shooter engine I've ever seen, because it's not a shooter, it's a puzzle game. It's impossible to describe, so you'll just have to play it. If you enjoy challenging your spatial relations and problem-solving skills, you'll love this game.

The bad news is that it's a very, very short game. It took me two nights to finish it, maybe 5 hours total. Perhaps that's a good thing, though, because I could see Portal becoming a bit tedious after a while. You're basically performing the same task on every level, after all.

I also have to mention the end credits. Usually when a game is over there's a big let down and you think, "Is that it?" Not so with Portal. I can't remember any other game where I was glued to the screen after the game was finished. That silly "Still Alive" song is still stuck -- or should I say, still alive, hyuk hyuk -- in my head. Anyway, it was an incredibly creative and satisfying way to end a game. Good job, Valve.

I give Portal a 5... out of 5.

Found this little blurb in a random Google search. The Early RtCW Elite with a writeup about Crayola Clan:

:: 12. clan crayola ::
Clan Crayola have been coloring inside the lines so far with a 5-0 record over CAL and BoB. Crayola Clan is a Quake clan converted who have been involved in every Quake to date. The only blemish on this team's record I could find, was a CAL preseason loss in a close one versus Kreig. Lead by [Yellow] who can kick some serious ass, Crayola is getting ready to continue their early success nest week in both CAL and BoB. In BoB the crayons face up against another Quake convert clan in Orcana, I have a feeling we'll see the crayons in round 3 of BoB. In CAL this week, I have a feeling someone is gonna scribble on their picture though, Death Touch is the opponent and I hear they hate to color.

If memory serves, we not only lost to Orcana but also lost to Death Touch in another tournament. You can hear the play-by-play commentary of the disappointing Orcana match in this MP3 (note: skip past the first 35 minutes of pregame delays). Someday I had hoped to synchronize that commentary with a demo of the match and put it all in AVI format, but I don't think I have the demo anymore. :/

I made Commander (rank 55) in Call of Duty 4 and it unlocked a gold Desert Eagle gun. Big whoop. Now what? Well, the obvious answer is a big fat "nothing" unless I want to move into match play. For that I'd have to "tryout" for a clan, and in all this time I've been playing on pub servers and watching clans recruiting, I haven't seen any clans that I'd want to be associated with. Who would want to join a clan that recruits from pub servers anyway? :)

So I suspect my time in Call of Duty 4 is coming to an end, and I'll need to find another game. Surprisingly enough, there are several options to pick from. Gears of War, Crysis, Bioshock, and Mass Effect are all recent titles I haven't played yet. Though I will probably need to upgrade my computer before thinking about another game. I had to turn almost all the cool graphic settings off in COD4 to play at 60 fps.

But before I put the game away, I wanted to write down a couple of pub strategies in case anyone cared. Also because I'm bored.

For the record I settled on the M4 Assault Carbine with Red Dot sight as my weapon of choice. I think it's one of the best all-around guns, good for just about any occasion. (The only reason I didn't stick with the M16 is that sometimes it helps being able to fire more than 3 shots in a burst.) I used the Bandolier, Stopping Power, and Deep Impact perks. For Hardcore games and Free-for-all, I used the Bandolier, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence perks, along with a silencer on the rifle.

Through trial and error and observation, I've found that the same basic strategy works for all Team Deathmatch games: Get behind the enemy team. That's pretty much it. Standing on the front lines and slugging it out is not a very effective way to win, no matter how many people you put there. If I were designing a TDM match strategy, I would put roughly half the team on the front line to engage and hold the enemy team and the other half on flanking manuevers. Maybe add one or two other people roaming freely for support wherever needed.

The above flanking strategy works particularly well on the Crossfire map (shown above). It's one of my favorite maps, though I'm not precisely sure why. Maybe just because I know it pretty well. The map is basically a long, dusty street in some desert town. The pub teams almost always congregate at either end of the street and try to snipe each other to death from the buildings. So what you want to do is navigate through the buildings and alleys down to the other end of the street, get behind the other team, who will usually be bunched up and focused entirely on shooting people a mile away, and mow them down. Eventually someone will get wise to your strategy, though, so it doesn't work for very long. Also, if there are any smart players on the other team, they will be trying to do the same thing, so you'll often meet them in the middle. Oh, also -- make sure you sprint if you need to cross the street for any reason, and don't stop, or you'll be dead in seconds.

The same strategy also works on Downpour and Overgrown. Or any map where there's a middleground where the two teams naturally meet and battle, and there is also a less-obvious "back door" path to the other side of the map. (However, it's not as effective on Crash because snipers usually cover the back route, which is more-or-less a straight-line shot.)

Furthermore, I can't leave COD4 without one brief comment on the "Hardcore" game mode: I can deal with and even enjoy the lack of UAV and crosshair, but um, dear God, the weapons do even more damage?? In Hardcore mode a single bullet in the chest from almost any gun will drop you instantly. You might think you'd need to be really, really good to play Hardcore, but I tend to think the opposite: It doesn't take a great deal of skill when it's all instant point-and-click kills. The only real trick is finding ways to get the drop on your opponents.

All in all, I've had a lot of fun with COD4 multiplayer. I got my $49 worth out of it I suppose, despite the ridiculously short single player campaign.

I saw that Red snuck in an update on the Crayola Wiki reporting that Turquoise (aka. Aaron Smith) can be seen in a picture shown at the end of Gears of War. I had no idea he worked on that game, so that's pretty cool. I guess that means we can presume he works at Epic Games now, which I didn't know either. Congrats Turqy!

Woo! I can't believe how psyched I was to actually win a Headquarters game! Apparently all I had to do was switch to my old "Salamander" nick... that was only the second map I played after changing my name.

The last Call of Duty 4 patch (1.4) claimed to have made "improvements" to the server browser. I'm not sure what they consider an improvement, but clearly better pings and connections isn't a top priority. Quite frequently when I refresh the list, I see pings on the first page of servers ranging from like a low of 500 up to around 5,000. I'm not the only one seeing this, either. Just so Infinity Ward knows -- this is not an improvement from the previous version. It does not make me long for the nostalgia of dial-up modem play. (If you actually join a server listed with a ping of 500, your in-game ping is actually playable, but it's still in like the 150 range.)

I guess in a way it's helping me learn French and Russian because those are about the only servers I can find that are playable anymore.