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Crashing Castles

July 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… and this time I actually mean it. I am not sure what it was… the fact that I was completely exhausted by the end of the day, the hour or so I spent playing with friends… or the 15 minute walk I took before bedtime… but something helped. I went to bed around 9 pm and slept the entire night through without any panic attacks. Probably some of the best sleep I have gotten in awhile. So thank you all for the varied suggestions yesterday on the subject.

Crashing Castles

One of the best side effects of the steam sale, is it is a great opportunity to get your friends hooked on amazing games when they get priced on the cheap. I’ve been a huge fan of Castle Crashers for years, and used to play it with some friends on the Xbox 360. When it was released on steam… I picked it up immediately because seriously… it is worth buying on every platform you own. Right now it is going for the absolutely bargain basement price of $4 as part of the daily sale… and should be up there for at least another 24 hours.

As a result I got recruited last night when Ashgar picked up multiple copies of the game and gifted it to anyone who didn’t already have one. I have to say this was exactly the type of fun I had been needing. For me, Ash and Tam it was much like coming back home to our side scrolling fighting game roots… and we all adapted pretty quickly. Rae on the other hand, we could tell never really played that type of game… this compounded with the fact that she was playing with the keyboard… made the evening frustrating for her.

On that note… I highly suggest you pick this title up especially if you hail from the era of Final Fight and Double Dragon. But if you do so… I also highly suggest you have a gamepad to play it on. This was designed to play with an Xbox 360 controller… and I feel it plays best when I use that. It is completely playable on anything else however… but just remember all the tips and suggestions given in game… will be geared towards that specific controller. It won’t say press heavy attack… it will say press Y.. so if you are using something else there had to be a bit of translation in your head.

Just as a note to anyone on my steam friends list. I will almost never turn down an opportunity to play some castle crashers. There is something about this game that is so pure and fun that it just takes me back to the days of feeding quarters to gauntlet or teenage mutant ninja turtles and playing with three other friends. I really hope they create a sequel someday that is just as fun. The only game that I might like more than this as far as side scrolling beatemups… is Guardian Heroes… if it ever made its way to steam I would be immensely happy. Speaking of which… I need to get some people together to play the D&D Shadows of Mystaria steam port.

Granite Falls

Right now on my little warrior I am slowly making my way through the granite falls area. Stonefield has always been one of my favorite areas in the zone, in part because it was the area shown in the original cinematic trailer for the game. Additionally the town of Granite Falls is one of the prettiest in the game, and the falls themselves have always looked extremely epic. Sooner or later I will end up having to buy the Granite Falls dimension so I can have my very own copy.

I am up to my favorite quest chain as well, involving the crypt near town. Essentially giving me ANY quest chain involving undead and I will be happy. I started working on this over lunch, and got about halfway through the sequence of quests before I got drafted for castle crashers last night. My hope is that today I will push through the rest of Stonefield and move on to the Scarlet Gorge area. I feel like this is an area that just does not get enough credit in the game. I will have to play up another character when they have gone through with the redesign of the zone that is supposedly in the works.

Defying Reason

Also over lunch yesterday I decided on a whim to boot up Defiance for a little bit. I have an odd relationship with this game. I like it mostly… but I just can’t seem to take playing it for very long. I am happy to log in, kill a few rounds of mutants, maybe complete a quest… ride around in my dune buggy for a bit… and then log. I figure it would be much more enjoyable if I was playing regularly with a large group of people, but solo I seem to have a very short attention span.

I guess overall I just don’t like shooters as much as I once did… and the whole behind the back shooter thing works well but feels just awkward enough to give me a low tolerance for it. I really like the television show and the world, but so far I see little resemblance between the two other than having my very own “cat woman” telling me what to do. I just wish that the story had been set in the St. Louis area that we are vaguely familiar with in the television show… instead of out in California. Additionally since I am NOT from the California area and have never been… there just isn’t the same payoff as there is for other people. I didn’t realize that Mount Tam was an actual place… but I would have been able to pick up landmarks in Missouri.

Ultimately it is a good game… and it is pretty enjoyable… but I have the same patience with it that I have for Borderlands 2. I seem to be happiest when I play in spurts, unlike my friends that can literally play Borderlands 2 for hours and hours on end. Defiance definitely scratches a similar itch for me… and I finally found a weapon that I like. Essentially it is a heavy energy machine gun thing… reminds me of shooting a BAR in the WW2 area shooters. I can take down the baddies pretty successfully with it… but I cringe at the thought of eventually out leveling it. I have yet to find another weapon that I enjoy anywhere near as much as it.

I think this will continue to be one of those titles that I boot up every now and then… but never really dig too far below the surface. Additionally the game feels very “un-social”, and very much single player. I rarely if ever end up encountering other players when I play, and if I do they are usually buzzing around on their way to the next objective. I am sure this changes as you get higher in the content, but I am still in the starter area essentially. I could push through I am sure and get to the next area… but I figure why force myself when I seem to be enjoying little spurts of play here and there.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I need to wrap this up so I can get on with my morning and get into work. Today is trash day, so I need to make sure that is out by the curb. Additionally I really need to run some stuff by the cleaners. If I don’t get a start on these things I will end up extremely late for work. Right now I am essentially the boss, as mine is off on vacation… but it sets a bad example if I start slacking myself in the process. I hope you all have a great day… and here is hoping that today will be relatively panic free.

Don’t Panic

July 15, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… with the most forced cheeriness I can possibly muster. I had a pretty lousy night last night… and was unable to get to sleep until well after 1:30 am. I will get into the whys a bit later, but suffice to say… today is my first day back at work since the July 3rd. To raise the ante a bit, my boss will be out of the office and as a result I will be filling in for him in all the meetings he attends. This essentially is the equation for one of the most un-enjoyable weeks I’ve probably ever experienced.

Don’t Panic

I’ve been experiencing what has been termed panic attacks of varied levels of severity for some time. When I had my first ones… I literally thought I was having a heart attack… and as such was told to rush to the emergency room. At which point they hooked me up to an EKG, did some blood work… and essentially told me that I had had a panic attack. The problem is… were this a one time occasion I could take it in stride. This ends up happening most nights when I go to lay down and start trying to pack away the thoughts from one day and prepare for the next.

Last night was another night where I was in the thrall of the panic rollercoaster, and as such just could not sleep. The particular recipe last night was far less about a heart attack sensation… and more about hyperventilating, a feeling of shortness of breath… which is odd because I know the difference from being a life long asthmatic. I literally tried everything I could think of to calm myself down. I tried some deep breathing exercises and they worked exactly as long as I was doing them. Once I stopped for a moment… my body went back into full freak out state.

Essentially from what I can tell this is all being caused by the very real anxiety I experience at work. Essentially everything is in a state of turmoil. We are a ship without a rudder right now, and without a strong force at the head of our department… we are constantly shifting priorities based on which is thing is the most political advantageous. As a result my work world is pure hell, and I have no stability at all. This is something that I am finding out I guess my mind craves… stability.

What is so frustrating… is I understand what is going on… but I seem to be completely helpless to stop it. I had a pretty major freak out session during the day on Saturday… and at the suggestion of my wife I had a beer and seemed to calm down. So last night I tried the same thing… the last thing I want to end up doing is medicate with alcohol… but I was desperate. Unfortunately… that “fix” seemed to be a one time only thing… and in truth after I had finished my hard cider… everything seemed to get worse.

I essentially know it is work related because while we were in Albany… I had absolutely no panic attacks whatsoever. It was only once we returned… and I started to dread this work week that they came back with a vengeance. Ultimately I am going to have to see some form of medication to get me through these. I’ve never been on any form of a mood altering medication… and I have avoided them like the plague. However I am feeling like I need something, to help my body realize what my mind already does.

Elite Loyalty

Last night I managed to push across the loyalty barrier for the next tier. Upon completing the “purple” tier I got what is probably my favorite loyalty reward yet. I now have the option to display the red thorned “elite” mob portrait ring on my own player portrait in the UI. This is one of those little things that just feels cool. While roaming the world that portrait ring is ubiquitous with danger… and being able to rock that appearance on all my characters is just slick.

Additionally I got the Loyal Helmed Murdantix mount for all of my characters, and you can see my baby warrior riding it. It is extremely similar to the Ancient Murdantix mount that dropped in a raid instance, but it has the extra added bit of having a really cool helmet / blinder on it. For whatever reason it feels so much cooler to me than the old one. I’ve always loved the various “biped running on all fours” style mounts, but this is probably my favorite of them so far. It feels like I am riding a troll or werewolf or something similar into battle.

Of late I have been splitting my time mostly between Belghast@Faeblight the little warrior shown above, and Belgrave@Deepwood my level 53 nightblade/riftstalker rogue. I am still having a blast on both… especially the baby warrior. Which I am sure seems a bit insane since I have a level 60 warrior already. I find it interesting to play through the old content with fresh eyes. I working with the Dark Thane prebuilt spec, and it has changed massively since I last played it. I am enjoying the sense of discovery each time the game gives me a new ability to play with. Essentially it lets me learn the spec an item at a time, rather than being deluged with everything it offers at once at level 60.

On Belgrave, I have just started Seratos and am making my way slowly to Necropolis. I really love the dark bone woven zones of later Dusken… and they all seem to be carnage quest bonanzas. I am a major junkie when it comes to those kill quests… I just wish the reward source stones were actually useful to Belgrave. I have essentially purchased everything I can upgrade wise with them for awhile. I still have yet to figure out what exactly to do with the excess ones. If you guys know some cool use for them other than the gear upgrades… let me know.

As an indication for how much I am enjoying Rift… yesterday I took a break from my NDA bonanza just to get in some play time. That is saying a lot… because I love beyond love the game I am playing that is still under NDA. One of the interesting things about the free to play conversion is the daily and weekly gifts. Which surprisingly got upgraded massively when I bumped up to this next tier of loyalty. Instead of purple boxes… I started getting orange ones… and out of my weekly box I pulled a orange deeps box… which netted a really nice purple dps weapon for Belghast@Deepwood.

I find that the draw of knowing I have a new box every day keeps me logging in regardless of what else I am playing. It is something extremely simple but for me… it is effective. After logging in… I usually end up playing around and questing or crafting or even just hanging out in guild chat and talking. I love that Trion chose to use the carrot and not the stick when it came to the free to play conversion model. It seems to be working, because I am seeing lots of people online quite often. Would be awesome if I could get more of a critical mass there so we could do bigger things.

Wrapping Up

Since I am thoroughly out of it… I need to get this morning thing underway. I hope I survive the day with the small modicum of sleep that I was able to get. I also hope that today ends up being far better than I have made it out to be in my mind. I pray beyond reason that I can have a night off from the panic attack rollercoaster, because it is pretty much the opposite of fun. At least I guess if it happens again I can continue building in Minecraft… which is what ultimately caused me to calm down enough to sleep. I hope you all have a great day… and I hope it is stress free.

5 Biggest MMO Disappointments

July 13, 2013 by Belghast

This is one of those days I have zero clue what to write about… but as not to break the chain of constant posts I am going to push through and post something anyways. In part this post about nothing has been brought to you today by the letters N, D and A. So instead of a normal post about what I did last night, or what I want to do today… I am going to make a post about my top five biggest MMO disappointments. This is kind of the bookend to my post about my five favorite MMOs, so hopefully I can do this without coming off overly negative about each.

The Disclaimer

Some of my picks for this list will be rather controversial… but they are my picks nonetheless. This list is not about what I consider to be the worst MMOs, or even bad MMOs at all. In fact most of the ones included on this list are games I have played over and over again… and will likely play again in the future. On the converse… these are the games I have been the most disappointed by over the years. This could be due to lack of content, lack of depth, lack of features… or just simply lack of follow through. This is by no means a death sentence for an MMO… it wouldn’t be on the list at all if I didn’t care. For example… I do not care at all for TERA or Aion… but I was not necessarily disappointed in either because I was not expecting to like them in the first place.

5 – World of Warcraft

If you remember… I included World of Warcraft as number five on my five favorite MMOs list… and I think placing it in the number five spot on this list adequately represents the love/hate relationship I have with this game. Without a doubt I have had some of the best times playing WoW, but I have also had some of my biggest disappointments in the path they have chosen to grow it. It feels like an old high school friend… that you were extremely close to… but after years of being apart you grew in two completely different directions. While you want really badly to be happy for it… you can see the potential that was there… and how it has been squandered.

World of Warcraft was a game that I expected not to like in the first place. I remember my very first thought when I heard about it… was where the hell would they get their story. Until Warcraft 3… every Blizzard game had essentially only had enough storyline to keep the game from completely falling on its face. After experiencing the deep and rich world of Norrath… I did not think that Blizzard could pull off anything that engaging. I was wrong… they wove together a world that was deep, rich, and filled with lore. Additionally they incorporated the best features of every game that had come before it… and remixed it in a way that truly represented the absolute best of breed for the time.

However over the years… they have butchered the lore… and instead of continuing to incorporated the best features on the market… have instead created half assed versions of them. I have to keep coming back to the Transmogrification system… because it personifies this concept of the modern Blizzard approach. They took something awesome… alternate appearance systems… and instead turned it into an extremely cludgy money sink. The same thing happened over and over as they tried to incorporate features of popular mods… but the official version was never anywhere near as solid as the original mod that inspired it.

Then on the other side of the coin… the content was just lacking. When new content was introduced… it was too little to late. Like a quick appetizer that never quite turned into a meal. Shortly after the release of Cataclysm… I started a brand new Worgen Druid… and managed to level it without much effort in under 5 days played time. Additionally the raid content just felt more and more uninspired… remixes of previous encounters. So I will admit… at times I am one of those guys… that views the golden area of vanilla through rose colored lenses.

For certain players the new mix of content and the pacing works. I have a ton of friends who are still knee deep in the thrall of this game… and more power to them. I just reached a point where I could not view anything but the disappointment. As a result I am not playing, and trying my best not to complain on a regular basis about the game. But… additionally I do not feel this post would be honest if I did not include WoW in the mix. I feel like it still has so much potential, and maybe if they changed to a content driven DLC style free to play model… they would have the endorsement to build content other than the raid ladder and dailies.

4 – Guild Wars 2

This is another title I did not really expect to like when I first heard about it. I was never a huge fan of Guild Wars 1 despite everyone telling me just how amazing a game it was. I liked some of the concepts presented, like the Magic the Gathering style ability system and the ability to multi-class… but everything else about that game I really despised. If I do not like your games user interface or control scheme… no matter how awesome a game it is underneath I just cannot bring myself to play it… no matter how many times I try. So all of this said I really had written off the concept of Guild Wars 2.

This all changed however when the folks at Arena.NET posted their Design Manifesto. It basically said everything I thought I wanted to hear, and laid out a great vision for a new game. So I was amped when I was able to get access to the testing program. However I was immediately disappointed in the experience I had there, and lack of what honestly felt like a game. I was disillusioned enough that I actually resigned from testing and wished them luck. One of my friends remained in the test a little bit longer than I did… and eventually bailed himself. I hoped they would find some direction and turn the project around.

When it came time for open beta testing… I gave the game another shot. The lowered expectations of expecting to dislike the game… caused me to view it through slightly different eyes. I enjoyed the game enough that I picked it up when it came out. The problem is… there just was not enough meat on the bones to hold my attention for long. There are definitely some aspects of the game that I enjoyed, but the whole experience felt very disposable… more so than any game I had experienced.

Additionally it did not feel like I was progressing my character at all. By the time I reached level five, I had unlocked all 5 abilities for my primary weapon choices and the signets and other related abilities… just did not feel like they had enough weight to them to make them something worth striving towards. The game set out to abolish the holy trinity of tank, healer and dps… but the problem is that it didn’t really replace it with anything in the process. Group content felt like a chaotic mess, and I was extremely disappointed when I did my first dungeon and realized the zerging a boss down from a spawn point was totally a viable tactic.

In the Manifesto they proposed that – Shouldn’t Great MMOs be Great RPGs too? The only problem is the key means for moving the story along in a role playing game is the questing construct… but they sought to abolish that as well. Once again… it is fine that they wanted to change the game… but they didn’t really replace it with anything meaningful in the process. As a result I felt extremely disconnected to the world around me. Things were going on around me… on scripted timers… but I didn’t really care about whether or not we won or lost. I didn’t care about the people and place… and the lack of questing did this.

In the Manifesto they stated that it was time to make MMORPGS more social. The only problem with that is that they introduced so much passive grouping, and took away any need for player roles… that the end result is one of the least social games I have played. When roaming around the world… you may be fighting along side other players, but you do not have to interact with them in any meaningful way. Each player is a self sufficient independent state… and as a result has no real need for anyone other than themselves. The game just feels like it is lacking reasons for players to actually be grouping together.

Let me reiterate, there is a lot to like about the game. It runs amazingly well on low end hardware, and presents a very fluid gaming experience. It has one of the prettiest worlds I have ever explored, and has a lot of things that incentivize exploration. While it is presenting a ton of new content in the form of now bi-monthly updates… the problem is most of it is limited time only. Instead of growing their world… they are creating disposable episodes that only serve to make the game play experience all the more disposable itself.

3 – Star Wars: The Old Republic

I’ve loved Star Wars since before I could even fully verbalize it. My parents tell stories about me seeing the movie when I was one… and then coming home and jabbering endlessly about “Darfa Bater”. So if there was any game that has enough storied lore to hold my attention… it should have been SWTOR. I was a huge fan of Knights of the Old Republic, and as a result I was completely committed to the genre they genre they chose to set the films in. Additionally I love the Bioware style of storytelling, and am a pretty huge Dragon Age and Mass Effect junky.

All of these things should have made SWTOR be the next 8 year game for me. The problem is… the experience while amazing… is overall disposable once you have made your way through the content. So much care and feeding were placed on making sure the quests were just right… and the voice acting was flawless… that it greatly cut into the total amount of content available. The three chapters that were available at launch… felt like an awesome introduction to the game… but the main course never really arrived.

I hear the Makeb release is extremely nice… and the continuation of the storyline extremely successful. The only problem is… that content came a year too late to stave off the players leaving. I feel like had they had more content in the pipeline and ready to release a month after launch, they would have been able to keep the majority of all the players that started playing. We just burned through the content way faster than they had expected. Additionally the fact that there was only one path per faction… and that essentially all the quests were the same minus the handful of class specific ones… alting became extremely tedious.

Additionally when they chose to go free to play… they adopted one of the most blatantly abusive models I have seen. Essentially with free to play, you can choose to take the carrot or the stick… and things like gear locks, pay walling what should be base features, and rolling out a never ending stream of unique lockbox gear just feel too much like being beat with the stick for me. It has however been extremely lucrative for Bioware… and enabled the game to keep its doors open. If it means they continue to release new content… then in the long run it could be good for the game as a whole.

I am still disappointed however at what could have been. Had they been able to launch a continuation of the main storyline each month or so… it would have kept me glued to the game. The original storyline was amazing… and there is no taking that away from the game. The Jedi Knight storyline is probably one of the most epic story arcs I have experienced in any game. It was just over way too soon, leaving me nothing really left that I wanted to do. The problem is… that content was extremely expensive to produce. There was never a way that they ever could have kept up with the demand.

2 – Champions Online

One of my all time favorite pen and paper games is Heroes Unlimited by Palladium games. I had early experiences with D&D and AD&D… but this was the game that really hooked me on the possibilities of role playing games. What made the system so cool is that it had rules to create literally any type of super hero or super villain you could imagine. Of course I created my share of Wolverine or Batman clones… but the game system was this fertile group that through a series of roles I could create some unique characters as well. What made the game so engaging was that the sky was literally the limit in the types of things you could create.

I was a huge fan of City of Heroes, because it gave me some of this same rich character building… but did so in an easy to digest MMO form. That game however had a lot of short comings… and when Champions Online was announced it looked to be addressing all of these base issues and creating this wild open ended super hero creation system. You could mix and match power sets… creating your own custom mix for your character… and this was placed on top of a character generator that was even more robust than City of Heroes. Everything sounded like the perfect super hero game… and I was hooked on it early.

The problem is… the power sets were grossly imbalanced. This is the first game I had ever played where certain power sets were literally unplayable. You could reach a point where you just simply could not progress any further due to the choices you had made. On the other side of the coin… certain power sets were so grossly overpowered that they completely removed any challenge from the content at all. You could steam roll over the top of anything, while your friend that chose one of the broken ones… could not even fight the lowest rank mobs.

The major disappointment is that they did a very poor job of mitigating the different power sets. They would buff one…. but then another power set would become the broken one… making it a constant cycle of your favorite power set potentially becoming the unplayable one. The game had all the potential in the world… and just became grossly mismanaged. Instead of understanding that this constant state of power flux and un-playability was what was driving their players away… they instead decided to streamline the content.

I really do not remember the timing, but I believe this happened around the time of the free to play conversion. Previously there had been a pretty interesting storyline that had multiple paths your characters could take. The end result ended up with everything being a big jumbled mess. The thing that ended up as the nail in the coffin however… is that coming back as a free to play character… I could not play any of my existing characters. Each and every one included some costume bits that were not open to free players. This should be a lesson to anyone… grandfather existing characters… because holding players characters hostage behind a pay wall is never a good call.

1 – Warhammer Online

I had to put this one at number one… because really this game turning out the way it did is one of my biggest gaming regrets. I love Warhammer… have since I was in middle school and painting my very first citadel miniatures. I love the world and the lore… and the sheer brutality of the chaos gods. They took a failing IP and placed it in the hands of MMO veterans… Mythic games… who had brought the world Dark Age of Camelot. It seemed like a no-fail proposal. I thought they knew exactly what players wanted… and could borrow from the success they had with DAoC and all the nuts and bolts that make a game work.

Unfortunately Warhammer Online is really the tale of two games. The one to twenty experience was amazing. The PVE content rich, the new public questing construct extremely fun, and the early battlegrounds extremely inventive and enoyable to play. I still think that the early experience in Warhammer Online ranks among some of my favorite leveling experiences. The problem is that when you hit about 20-25 the bottom fell out… the PVE content ceased to be interesting… and became increasingly more sparse. The game changed from this fun questing experience to this “go grind pvp to level” experience.

I feel like the game as a whole was a clash between these two seperate games… one of which I enjoyed immensely… the PVE experience… and one I really could care less about.. the PVP experience. Had they given me a pure PVE warhammer game… I would probably still be playing it. The game as a whole did so many innovative things, and there were so many mysteries around the world to unlock for your book of deeds. Additionally it shipped with an Addon system that was on par with World of Warcraft, and presented some extremely interesting class and race choices.

If only they had focused on giving equal time to both the PVE and PVP experience. The only problem is… I feel like the makers of this game have come to completely different conclusions about why it failed. Mark Jacobs has gone on to create Camelot Unchained… which serves to be a purely PVP game completely casting aside any PVE aspects. I feel like his take away was that it failed because it just was not PVP enough. In truth not a single friend that was playing left because of lack of PVP. We had a guild of around 40 players… and all of us left when the post 20 forced pvp experience began. Harecore PVP players are a niche within a niche, and I just don’t feel that you can really build any game solely around them as your target audience.

This is probably the game I feel would beneift the most from a free to play conversion. Awhile back I signed up for a new free trial account just to give the game a spin and see if it really is as good as I remembered. Overall the starter experience is still extremely fun, even though they have dumbed down the richness quite a bit by funneling everyone into the empire lands. I feel like a free to play version, might pump a bit more life into the title and allow it to survive. The problem is… this has become the textbook example for MMO failure… and I doubt EA would spend a dime on it going forward. As a result I will always be left with the thoughts of what might have been had the direction been a bit more sound.

Wrapping Up

This post ended up going a lot longer than expected. I’ve been typing for around an hour and a half now, but finally have reached a point where I have said what I needed to say about each of them. Hopefully none of them came off as too terribly ranty. I hope you all have great weekends, I will mostly be trying to relax a bit before Monday. I am already stressing out quite a bit, because I know going back I will be having to fill in for my boss as he is going out of town.

Homeward Bound

July 11, 2013 by Belghast

This morning as I sit at the keyboard typing away… my laptop remains essentially the only thing not yet packed and ready too be loaded into our rental. I have a mixture of excitement and trepidation… excitement because I will be so glad to be home… and trepidation because I detest flying… and know I have to deal with a 3 hour flight from Newark to Tulsa. Hopefully everything at home is just fine, and that our animals are all happy and healthy, and that the house sitter had no real issues.

Holding Pattern

The most frustrating thing about this trip so far has been that while I had all the time in the world to do anything I liked… I did not have stable enough internet to do much of it. Sunday night when we finally arrived at our hotel room, the internet was awesome… while not quite up to what I am used to at home… it was more than sufficient. Monday the cast of an off Broadway show arrived… and from that point onwards regardless of the time of day… most everything has been unplayable if I could even get connected in the first place.

It feels like so much has been going on this week, with the anniversary events happening in The Secret World and a release of a new content update. Then over in Guild Wars 2 there is quite a lot of stuff happening as well. Finally I am still in the thrall of my Rift resurgence… and for whatever reason this is the game that seems to hate the hotel internet the most. I will start off with a decent ping, but very quickly it degrades into completely unplayable. Often times I ultimately just ended up disconnecting and not being able to get back on afterwards.

Very quickly I realized that I would have to just wait to do much of anything until I got home today. As a result I feel like I have been trying to find things that did not necessarily involve an internet connection to play them. Unfortunately while my laptop is loaded full of MMOs… it is sadly lacking in the single player and offline departments. With the Hotel Internet not being super stable… I can’t really download anything from steam that I have in my archives.

A Game of Cubes

Cube World was released last week sometime… but the store went almost immediately offline… and stayed that way for the majority of the week. When the ability to purchase the game came back… they had taken the new accounts sign-up feature offline. So it became a daily activity of checking whether or not this was open for registration, and finally on Saturday night… before we left for Albany… the registrations opened up and I was able to grab ahold of a copy. This game has served as my mostly offline shiny new thing to play with on this trip.

The game as a whole is much harder than I was expecting it to be. Initially I was thinking this would be much more Minecraft than it has ended up being. Essentially you start out in a completely randomly generated world… with little to no ability to actually kill anything. At first you end up following around packs of NPC adventurers that will help you combat the bad guys you encounter in the world. As a result… the process of getting from “I suck at everything” to “I can survive mostly on my own” feels a little tedious.

I am not sure if this is just another game that loathes melee players or not, because generally ranged tends to be easier as a whole than melee in most games like this. I detest finger wigglers. so of course I had to go for sword and board… though over time I have migrated to dual wield. The block mechanic works well enough… but only for insanely short periods of time. When you are dealing with monsters that seem to be able to do non-stop special moves… it just isn’t enough to make the difference.

My biggest complaint thus far is that the torch feels inadequate for illuminating anything really. It creates roughly a 5 block by 5 block bubble of light around you… but when it comes to exploring anything like a cave… it is extremely hard to see where you are going. I am hoping that over time you can get upgrades that increase your radius of light similar to how you can in Terraria. If you intend to craft metal upgrades… you will spend a lot of time looking for caves, fighting bats and destroying iron nodes. As a result the lighting system feels extremely limiting.

The major complaint I have had with the system… is that I feel it would have been better if it supported a building system like Minecraft or Terraria. I like exploring… but I also like having bases of operation that gives me a feeling that I am actually changing the world around me. The exploration aspect of the game is great, and I love encountering monsters I have never seen before… and often times dying to them the first time. But I wish I could be building things in the world as well. If this game could be blended with Minecraft the hybrid would probably be the most addicting game ever.

Fort Belghast

As a direct result of playing Cube World… and this feeling that I wanted to be shaping my world… I have spent a lot of time alternating back and forth between exploring in that game… and building over in Minecraft. I started a brand new world and the seed I chose had a really nice shallow cave system. I started off boxing that in and using it as a prebuilt base until I started constructing a proper fort on top of it. Right now the underground area has a few large chambers, with a structure growing up into the little fort that you can see in the image above.

I created an elevated bridge style entrance, because it allows me to see what is surrounding my base before exiting out into the dangerous world. Also when there are a large number of zombies or similar around me… it funnels them into one single block place for farming. Additionally if I absolutely have to… I can bail over the wall to escape something. Right now I am quarrying stone from below the base to build up the tower system above. As you can see in the above picture… the tower is currently woefully unfinished.

I hope to do some terracing eventually to clean up the area and make the approach to my fort a little nicer looking. I have really not done that much exploration… my focus has really been on building up a solid base of operations. Eventually I will start a mine system below my base where I can hopefully get plenty of ores and other special resources. I mostly play Minecraft to build structures… but for whatever reason it feels more real to me.. if I do it on survival. I could be just as happy playing on creative… since all I really want to do is build nifty things… but the world then feels completely dead.

Homeward Bound

I cannot express in words… how happy I will be to leave this area and get back home. I miss essentially everything… my animals… my comfy sofa… a world that makes sense to me. I’ve found plenty of interesting things to do to kill my time… but it was not really the grand voyage of discovery I was hoping for. I know the workshop my wife attended, has been massively useful for her… and each night she has come home with pictures of the labs and activities they did. So the major focus of this trip was a complete success… and my being here… was just to make sure that happened.

I came on this trip just because I wanted to make sure my wife could attend this workshop. While she is a trooper and an amazing road warrior… she would have struggled with driving in this environment. She doesn’t really like driving period… and Tulsa traffic is far more sane and rational than anything I have experienced here. Her lack of depth perception would have been a major issue in this environment where I am essentially constantly scanning both sides of the street watching for some idiot that is about to dart out into the middle of traffic (as has happened so many times I have lost count). So ultimately regardless of how I have felt about this vacation… I feel like my role in it was a success.

So essentially today I have to check us out of the hotel at noon and then figure out a way to kill 3 hours of time until I pick my wife up from class. We are ferrying two other classmates to the airport… turning in our rental… and catching a 5 pm flight to Newark. We have a 45 minute wait until we catch another flight to Tulsa that should take 3 hours. So hopefully by about 9:30-10ish tonight I will be home in my own bed. After the hotel bed all these nights… our comfy bed at home will be amazing.

Wrapping Up

This has been an interesting experiencing even if it has not been super exciting. Time for me to do some googling to figure out how exactly I will kill the rest of the day. Thinking I will play some Minecraft until around noon… pack up the rental and then set off and do something for the rest of the afternoon. Elo was telling me about another mall with another game store… so I will likely set my sights on that. I hope you all have a great day, and that it is relatively uneventful.