Games of the Decade: 2013

Final Fantasy XIV – A Realm Reborn

This morning we continue the series that involves me looking back at the games released in the past decade. When you look at 2013, there were an awful lot of good and interesting games released, but again we are focused on the games that were specifically important to me. You are probably going to have your own list and there are going to be titles that I exclude that were absolutely bedrock to your gaming experience. Lets dig in because I dredged up four games from my memories and want to talk about them.

Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes – PC

Every so often there is a game that comes along that you don’t fully appreciate until it is gone. You will know my love of Diablo style games if you have read this blog for any length of time. Marvel Heroes was an extremely solid entry into that genre, and instead of slaying demons you focused on playing one of the Marvel Super heroes and taking down the traditional baddies of that genre. This is a game that was probably well before its time, and had it been released with the full support of Disney it could have possibly ended up differently.

I mained Captain America because at the end of the day he has consistently been one of my favorite heroes. The only one of my friends who was also super into this game was Thalen, and as a result I spent quite a bit of time running amok with him and clearing content. When I look back this is one of the games that I find I miss the most and wish I had a modern equivalent. There is Marvel Future Fight on the handhelds but it is a little too “free to play” for my tastes. This game had quite possibly the best starting experience because you could effectively play any hero to level 10 before choosing which one you wanted to unlock all of the way. There were also plenty of options for unlocking random heroes withing paying cash shop currency. Will always miss this game and unfortunately it never seemed popular enough for us to be able to get an emulator server.

State of Decay

State of Decay – Xbox 360

I love this game, and I am not entirely certain if I can fully explain why. Firstly I am a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, and I still to this day watch Walking Dead and its spin off Fear religiously when the season is going on. Both shows have sorta jumped the shark but I can’t seem to pull myself away from them. I also love games that let me explore and loot areas freely, and State of Decay is a bit of an amalgam of what I think of as the Fallout experience with the Zombie Apocalypse genre. The game also has a heavy emphasis on base building and recruiting new survivor groups to help you out.

The original game was released in June on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360, and I think I bought multiple copies of the game when it came out on Steam to gift to friends. This is just one of those games that I keep going back, especially once the YOSE or Year One Survivor Edition came out adding in all of the DLC content. The big innovation that this game provided that I loved, was the ability to board up windows to buy yourself more time to safely look a location as rummaging tends to attract zombies. Still well worth playing especially as cheap as the YOSE package tends to be these days.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn – PC

I figured if I was going to talk about Final Fantasy XIV I should dig out some of my older screenshots. This is your reminder that I started the game as a Highlander. My true enjoyment finally came when I decided to Fantasia my way into Lalafellian adorableness, but my first experiences were as the angriest Bel ever. This game is still to this day one of the best roleplaying game experiences I have ever played. While I keep finding myself falling out of sync with its long term gameplay, I can always return and gobble up new story content and get back into the swing of things.

A Realm Reborn is a feat that should be celebrated, of a game company doubling down on a game that failed spectacularly and then managed to transform that lump of coal into a diamond. This is the “Rudy” sports movie metaphor for the video game world, and we all sorta love that it happened. When you see a bad launch you need this in the back of your head of a time when it did work out, and secretly hope that the company has the fortitude to pull something of this scale off (I am looking at you Anthem). I just heard some news yesterday that Final Fantasy XIV has passed into the 18 million active accounts territory, and that is phenomenal. If you’ve never played this game you should absolutely pick up a copy and try it out. Cactuar is by far the best server and if you can’t stand its radiance… then at least land on the Aether data center.

Pokemon X and Y

Pokemon X and Y – Nintendo 3DS

This game gets special recognition largely because this is the first time I allowed myself to get caught up in PokeMania. This is the first Pokemon experience I have ever played at launch, and honestly the first time I have really experienced the ins and outs of the game at all. I played Pokemon Blue a bit with an emulator, but I was a College Junior when the original games came out and had long since moved beyond caring about my Gameboy. I had a lot of fun getting caught up in the magic of a Pokemon launch and have since participated in other games including the most recent Sword and Shield. I am still not great at playing this sort of game but I do find them enjoyable. I however care way more about collecting all of the Pokemon than I do about battling, and more or less find battling to be a necessary evil to accomplish the first goal.

Risk of Rain

Risk of Rain – PC

This is the game that made me realize that I actually do like Rogue Likes. I would probably not have realized this however without the help of Ashgar who spent time playing the game with me. I want to do this again at some point with Risk of Rain 2 and see how well the experience translates to 3D. This is a game that absolutely overwhelms the player, but over time you start to learn the rules of the road and figure out which power-ups you should be focused on. I enjoy the game way more when playing with other people, but I have found myself revisiting from time to time on my own and trying out new classes that I have unlocked. The difficulty scales as you go making it extremely frenetic as you near the end of a level. If you’ve never checked out this game, I am sure you can pick it up these days for next to nothing.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2013

I have to say that 2013 was a bit of a renaissance year for me. It was the year that I began my three plus year long adventure of blogging every single day. This taught me a lot about myself and also showed me the therapeutic benefit of sitting down every morning and dumping my thoughts and feelings out onto the written page. Because of this event so many other things happened like AggroChat my weekly podcast and the whole Blaugust thing and the community that has developed around it. It was a great year.

MMOs Worth Playing: Marvel Heroes

Costumed Madness

mmosworthplayingJust as a quick reminder, this series is about me highlighting games that I think are well worth the look.  This is by no means a complete list of games, and there are still a bunch more that I just have not gotten around to talking about.  These are largely titles that I feel like everyone should probably at least give a try once.  I am largely focused on games that don’t necessarily get the press or hype that some of the more prevalent titles like World of Warcraft do.  I figured in honor of Halloween I would talk about a game that is entirely about dressing up in costume and taking out bad guys.

A Tale of Improvement

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In 2013 when Marvel Heroes launched… it was plagued with problems.  Not the least of which was the fact that it was pretty much universally reviewed as a massive cash grab.  The game itself was not that terribly fun, and any heroes or costumes purchased on the store were oppressively over priced.  You can look at any of the reviews from 2013 and they all pretty much say the same thing, that the gameplay is lackluster at best… and that it is ridiculous to have to pay $20 to play as an A list hero like Ironman.  The game has since re-invented itself and gone through a number of changes… before eventually rebooting itself as Marvel Heroes 2015.  Rebranding is one of those fiddly things, but in this case the game that exists now is a very different gameplay experience than the one that launched.

During my time playing the game they have made constant incremental changes to the experience.  Originally the game asked you to essentially pick your free champion blindly, and now you can play any number of champions all to level 10 before finally choosing one to unlock all of the way to 60.  This gives you time to get in and experience the way a champion performs before finally committing to it.  In my case I have found that many of my favorite Comic Book heroes and anti-heroes…  are not necessarily something that I want to play.  For example I have always loved the Punisher, but the game play felt a little lacking since I am not a huge fan of ranged combat.  On the other side of the coin… I have never really liked Captain America as a comic book…  but playing as him is freaking amazing.  He is this massive shield slinging badass that I love playing, and my friend Grace has a similar experience with Iceman ending up being the character that she stuck with.

True to the Source

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Another thing I love about the game is just how integrated it is into the Marvel Universe.  There are so many characters, costumes and team-ups that come from the deep bowels of comic history.  Remember that one time Punisher was a Frankenstein-like monster?  Well Marvel Heroes does… and offers the costume as an option during Halloween.  Remember that time Wolverine was infected by the Brood?  Yup Marvel Heroes also offers that costume.  If there is a movie released, or a big comic event… you can fully expect Marvel Heroes to roll out a special event to mark it.  During the Avengers Age of Ultron release… you got bonus experience anytime you played an Avengers character or grouped with one for example.  Obviously at this same time they offered a brand new pack of costumes representing the way the characters looked in the movie at a “priced to own” value…  but none of it feels like something you have to have to keep playing the game.

My favorite aspect of the game is the way it handles gender swaps for characters.  For an increasing number of the champions in this game, they offer an alternate gender version.  What makes this awesome is the fact that they are once again mining the rich Marvel history to make it happen.  For example if you want to play a female Punisher, you instead end up playing Rachel Cole-Alves a character that has allied with the in comic Punisher a few times and even wore the costume.    Granted this is not the case for every character in the game…  like Lady Loki is just that… a female version of Loki.  However it is absolutely comic book canon that there was one time when Loki was brought back as a woman, so even then… it absolutely fits.  This works both ways…  so in addition to Scarlet Witch and her many female costumes… you can play as Wiccan, or among the many Captain Marvel Carol Danvers costumes… you also have an old school male Captain Marvel as well.

Cost of Being a Hero

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I realize I am not actually talking about the game-play much but really…  if playing a Diablo style game with Marvel Heroes is not enough of a hook for you… then you probably should play something else.  This game is all about the fantasy fulfillment of running around as a super hero and beating up cartoon bad guys to make the street explode into a shower of bright colored loot.  The challenge of the game should be mentioned… because if its default state that challenge is next to non-existent.  They have essentially started calling this base difficulty “Story Mode” and you play through it while finishing the main story.  After finishing the story you can ratchet up the difficulty as you see fit and visit any of the previous areas for leveling purposes.  These later difficulties feel more akin to the harder difficulties in Diablo 3, but it is somewhat sad that unlike D3 you cannot simply play on hard all of the time.  You have to finish the normal mode before you can start anything more aggressive.

The biggest change since the 2013 incarnation is the fact that the game really is “free” or can be pending you don’t just fall in love with anything in particular.  What I love the most about the game is that you can collect these items while roaming in the world called Eternity Splinters, and with them you can purchase specific champions… or do what I end up doing and simply gamble on one of the 100 spliter random hero boxes.  I’ve managed to pull several of the big name heroes that I have like Star Lord and X-23 through these random boxes, and it gives you the feeling of making some forward momentum without a ton of grinding.  When talking about the price of things, that too has changed significantly.  The blade pre-sale for example is happening right now and its $16.19 for the champion and an alternate costume, with a normal price around $20.  Still not the cheapest thing in the world… but not that insane either considering there are fairly easy in game ways to get all of the champions as well.

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Honestly I stayed away from this game for years… because of the bad press surrounding it’s launch.  It was only after seeing a good friend of mine playing it every single night on steam, that I finally decided to give it a chance.  I am extremely happy that I did, and even though I don’t play it all that often it is yet another in a long line of games that has re-invented itself for the better.  I seriously feel like the era of big AAA games is past us… or at least the era of “American” AAA MMOs that is.  I qualify that because it seems like South Korean is going through the same sort of period that we did during the big MMO boom.  In the meantime I am really enjoying watching these older titles figure out how to make their games work, and more than happy to support them finding a new niche.  The awesome thing about Marvel Heroes is the barrier of entry is non-existent.  If you are looking for a fun Diablo style game… head to steam and install it.  If you do, let me know what you think.

 

Blaugust Games of Week – Week 1

Pre-emptive Thank You

Yesterday I freaked a lot of people out by calling it the Blaugust Eve.  As I have explained on twitter, I was accounting for my amazing time travelling Aussie and Kiwi friends for whom… right now IS the start of Blaugust.  For the rest of us at the time of posting this we have a little more wiggle room before the festivities kick off.  I have to say last year was an insane ride for me, as much as it was for the contestants.  The intent was to run everything through the Blaugust Nook but that didn’t exactly happen, and it quite literally made my life hell.  I ended up spending a couple of hours a day trying to sort out who posted what when and in what time zone they were posting from…  and then the people who posted after midnight in their own time zone…  only served to add to the complication.  There were numerous times I tried to track down people on twitter or IM to ask if they meant X post to be on Y day or not.

This year it seems like most everyone has registered on the Nook which is going to help, but what is going to be even more important is advertising your daily posts there with the day number you are intending it to be.  On your side that is a small amount of work, but on my side that is saving me literally hours of scouring… and is hopefully going to allow me to actually read blogs during the course of the event.  As soon as things start I have to flip into book keeper mode, and while I might be “reading” posts I was not necessarily enjoying them last year because of all of the technical foibles.  So I am thanking you ahead of time for complying with the list of rules, because it is going to make my life not horrible over the next thirty one days.  I’ve been a fan of Anook for awhile, so much so apparently that yesterday someone thought I worked for them.  I just think they do a great job of giving me guild forum like functionality but also giving the ability to interact with other gamers.  I am amped this year about them sponsoring the Community Award, and we will ultimately sort out the specifics of that as the event goes on.

Games of the Week – Week 1

Yesterday we launched the writing prompts forum, and I thought it was pretty amazing that Void spent a good chunk of the day yesterday populating it with a bunch of ideas.  I plan on adding a new writing prompt to this post every day during the course of this event, but I wanted to go a little bit further.  Nothing makes more interesting posts than exploring a new game, or revisiting one that you have been fond of in the past.  As such I plan on highlighting three free to play games a week, with an attempt to mix up the styles a bit.  My hope is that if you are lacking inspiration, you can download and install one of these games and find plenty of things to write about.  Lets get on with the games!

Dirty Bomb – Nexon/Splash Damage

dirtybomb This is a game I played a bit in beta but have not really played much after it officially launched, and I am actually looking forward to playing it some more.  I have long been a huge fan of games by Splash Damage, and I spent many an hour playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory.  Hell I even joined a competitive clan while playing it, but never really did much more than scrimmage other teams.  Splash Damage creates a shooter quite unlike anyone else makes, and they tend to focus on these complex objectives that require multiple classes of players to complete them.  I always focused on the “Engineer” archetype because it made the game play more enjoyable for me as it gave me a higher purpose.  I am not big into “death matching” but I loved rushing headlong into a firefight trying to stay alive long enough to build a bridge or repair a tank.  This game is the logical extension of Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Quake Wars Enemy Territory and even to some extent the critical failure Brink.  I think I am one of the few people out there that wholeheartedly enjoyed Brink, and lately I have been feeling the itch to play some FPS action… and Dirty Bomb seems like it is going to fit that bill perfectly.

Download From SteamDownload From Nexon

Everquest II – Daybreak Games

EQ2_000008 I will always hold a special place in my heart for Norrath, the setting of the Everquest universe.  When World of Warcraft launched I was torn because part of me wanted to be playing Everquest II.  Instead I went where the bulk of my friends went, but continued to periodically visit the setting of EQ2 throughout the years.  It has some of the best world building I have seen in any game, and the scope of the zones just feel so massive compared to almost anything else on the market.  They innovated in so many ways, and had so many rich systems like one of the best Mentoring systems out there for the time.  As the years have ticked by the game has felt more and more like a dated relic, however there is a simple nostalgic charm to it that I still find appealing.  They seem to be banking on taking this nostalgia to market, as they have opened a time locked progression server allowing players to go back and experience the world as it was during the early days.  This is making me seriously consider re-rolling and starting fresh on this new server, but I have had so many other competing goals that I just have not done it yet.  My goal is this week to roll a character and check it out, but unfortunately that means I am going to have to buy a new character slot on my already loaded account.  If you are looking for a world loaded with inspiration… this is a good place to start.

Download From SteamDownload from Daybreak

Marvel Heroes 2015 – Gazillion

MH_SCREEN_042314_013 Another game that I really enjoy but find myself not playing a lot of right now is Marvel Heroes.  This game provides Diablo II style game play, with a rich class based system in the form of all of the different heroes that you can play.  One of the coolest features of this game is the way that the you pick your first hero to level.  The game allows you to play a long list of champions to level 10, and then you get to unlock one of them and take it all the way to level 60.  This gives you plenty of time to get a feel for how they each play and their different abilities.  I personally tend to be a Captain America player, but there are heroes that fit just about any imagined play style.  The other thing that I really appreciate is the way that for the most part, the game gives me a pathway to unlock the things that I might want without hiding it behind an overly painful grind.  Champions are purchased with Eternity Splinters which drop fairly frequently while doing content in the world.  One of the complaints I have seen from friends is that the game play is extremely easy, and this is absolutely the case while you are playing on normal mode.  However after defeating the main storyline you can ratchet up the difficulty  much in the same way as you can in Diablo 3.  This is absolutely a really fun game and the freemium nature is not egregious in any fashion, so if you want some old school Diablo game play with MOBA inspired style character design…  you might check this one out.

Download From SteamDownload From Gazillion

Daily Prompt

Since I more or less posted a series of games that I have some connection to, or would like to have a better connection with.  The writing prompt for the day is somewhat connected to that.

What game that you are not playing, do you still have a deeply nostalgic connection to and why?

Let us hear what game you keep returning to even if you aren’t really actively playing it… or likely will never play it with quite the same fervor.  For me personally that game is absolutely Everquest II, and I still hold a torch for it even though at this moment I have not really played it over the course of the last two years.

Marvel Heroes Binge

A Truly Amazing Day

avengers-age-of-ultron-art-poster-133238 One of the huge positives about where we live is that we are close to an awful lot of things that are within reasonable walking distance.  Over the last year or so we have tried to take advantage of this fact by walking to dinner more often.  This weekend however I did something I should have done a very long time ago and walked to the movies.  There is a theater literally less than two blocks away from my house, but I’ve never actually walked there before.  Granted when walking to dinner we walk past it all of the time.  Sunday I decided to go to the 10:30 am matinee and watch the new Avengers movie.  The movie itself was pretty great, and i feel like I need to watch it again to really take in all of the sights the movie had to offer.  This is a very “busy” film packed with some absolutely insane action sequences.  I feel like it is a toss up between the Hulk and Black Widow as to who stole the show, but I have always been partial to both of them.

As I was exiting the theater I texted my wife to let her know that I would be on my way home.  However when I poked my head out into the light there she was waiting on me.  She walked down hoping to surprise me, and then the two of us walked over to get lunch.  It was a really beautiful day, and she is constantly telling me that I need to get more sunlight.  While I am still not the biggest fan of the sun, she is probably right because I feel better today after having done all of this yesterday.  We had some errands to run, but by the time we got back to the house we both decided it was nap time.  After getting back up we ran to target really quickly and then she went outside to read in the rocking chair, and I played games.  It was a pretty great day, and I am hoping to take advantage of the movie theater being so close in the future.  There are a lot of movies that I want to see that she has no interest in.  Walking down makes it feel less of a hassle for some reason, and also serves as some exercise.

Marvel Heroes Binge

MarvelHeroes2015 2015-05-03 19-40-14-108 It was probably because of the awesome Avengers movie, but when I got home I ran a quick expert roulette and then logged to play Marvel Heroes.  This game has really grown on me and I am feeling like a massive failure for not giving it a chance before now.  Normally the whole Diablo thing is a bit of a turn off anymore, but for whatever reason the combination of Super Heroes and Diablo works well for me.  I have been accumulating a lot of various boost potions, because they give you plenty of them as part of the daily login reward system.  Yesterday I opted to take several of the various 2 hour boosts and see what all I could accomplish.  I pushed Captain America that has become my main from 22 to 27 almost 28 over the course of those two hours.  Right now there are a lot of things working in my favor since there is an event happening that gives Avengers a boost.  The only bad thing is that the cosmic gear I am wearing has yet to be replaced which bums me out slightly.  I guess I might have to try my luck again at the cosmic boxes from Adam Strange.

I am just starting the Savage Lands which according to my friend is one of the more frustrating areas of the game.  I personally found that the tail end of Stryker’s camp to be extremely frustrating with Sentinels dropping on me every five seconds.  I keep feeling like I should probably play other characters up since I now have this whole synergy thing unlocked…  but really I am still having a blast playing Cap.  His skillset is almost perfect suited for my particular play style.  I can charge through a bunch of mobs taking them out, and then when I get into the center of a pack twirl my shield around taking all but the blue or better mobs out.  Then I just mob up with shield throws or punches and repeat.  It feels very enjoyable, but I am actually looking forward to seeing what the new heroic difficulty that I unlocked is like.  There are absolutely times that the game feels mindlessly simple, so I would be curious to see if Heroic is like hard is for Diablo 3… aka the new “normal”.

Closing in on Botanist

ffxiv 2015-05-04 05-52-41-84 Another thing I worked on last night was pushing Botanist up a bit more.  I really want to finish leveling this to 50, and have felt the need to do just this before really starting in on crafting proper.  I realize this might be a bit strange of logic but it works for me.  I spent my evening catching up on Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley, both shows that I had not really watched for the last few weeks.  While doing this I ran a whole slew of Botany leves and managed to push from 35 to 45 which hopefully means I can finish off the leveling process at some point this week.  I will be happy to have finished leveling the two harvesting professions that I am going to need to most while leveling my other  crafters.  Right now however I have to collect 20 high quality mistletoe to turn in to the quest giver.  This is going to be a fairly daunting task, given that I cannot simply buy my way through it.  It seems HQ mistletoe is in short supply as there was absolutely none on the market board.    As a result I will be spending the next little bit in the Whitebrim area harvesting like mad trying to complete the 45 quest.

The other thing I really want to do soon is push my Arcanist from 22 to 30 so that I can become a scholar.  If I manage to do that I can get to 50 relatively easily doing the fast healer dungeon queues.  Depending on how many leves it takes me to get to 50 Botanist, I might follow this interesting guide posted on the FFXIV Reddit.  Ashgar pointed this out, and it seems like a perfectly reasonable way to level.  I actually like chain running leves because it is also a decent source of retainer tokens.  I would love to see myself level a few more classes to 50 before the expansion, because I have 100 level weapons waiting on them.  I have been dumping my excess soldiery into buying the various weapons, and just have one left to purchase, which admittedly is a little insane.  The problem is… what else was I going to use that soldiery on?  I am actually right around the point where I need to buy the final weapon, which makes me feel like a slacker for not leveling all of those classes to 50.  Final Fantasy XIV has way more content than I could ever hope to do… so at times I just feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that I want to be doing.