Blue Kae

This post is 100% spoiler safe.

I absolutely loved Mass Effect 1. Not only was it one of the main reasons why I bought an Xbox 360, but it is on a fairly short list of games that I’ve finished.

With Mass Effect 2 coming out at the same time as Star Trek Online, I decided to hold off on buying the game for a couple of weeks. I knew I would be able to play both at once, and I wanted to get enough time in the headstart and get to Commander rank and qualify to captain an Akira class.

Also, I was a bit hesitant about whether or not the sequel would live up to my expectations. Quite a bit of the recent marketing for the game was hinting at a fairly dark tone. After trying to play Dragon Age: Origins and failing to get hooked, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy a darker look at the Mass Effect universe.

After Bryn’s promotion to Commander earlier this week, I decided it was time to pickup Mass Effect 2. Plus, I didn’t want to wait too much longer to pickup and play it, because I have a feeling that it is going to be hard to avoid spoilers soon on the various blogs and podcasts, not to mention twitter.

So around 11:30 or so I unwrapped the box and popped the disc into my Elite.

I finally tore myself away from the game and staggered to bed around 5 am. At some point during the play session, I started looking at the clock on my phone and calculating how much sleep I really had to have.

All my concerns about the darker tone and disappointed expectations were forgotten in the first 60 seconds.

That’s all I’m going to say about the game right now, except you’re really missing out if you don’t finish ME1 first. I don’t think that I would be having the same emotional response to ME2, had I not already “lived” through the prior events in Sheppard’s life. I know a few people who are struggling a bit to get through it, but in my opinion the payoff is well worth it.

Then again, games are supposed to be fun. So if you didn’t like ME1, I can completely understand why you wouldn’t want to grind through it before starting ME2.

After having a productive posting month in January, I’ve been pretty quiet so far in February. Partly because I was taking care of my son, who got strep throat, but mostly because I’ve been spending my evenings in the Star Trek Online headstart and then launch.

Basically, I’ve either been working, parenting, or captaining (with a little sleep and food occasionally). So this is a little later than I’d luck, but better than never right?

Headstart

I know lots of people had a pretty rough headstart, but I wasn’t one of them.

My playtime runs starts around 7 pm and runs until midnight (GMT-5), once my son is asleep and my wife is occupied with a book or television. So I didn’t get into STO on the Friday headstart launch until late. Which is good since I wasn’t part of the initial rush of players when the server went live in the afternoon. I bought the digital delux edition from Direct2Drive, so I also managed to dodge the Steam issues with re-downloading the whole client. All in all, I ended up playing 9 hours Friday night (until 4 am) and don’t remember having any issues.

Saturday was a little rougher, I did experience some longer loading screens and rubberbanding right up until late Saturday night when the server crashed, but I figured better get some sleep anyway since it was 2 am.

In total I put in about 20 hours of play time (according to my Raptr profile) from Friday to Sunday. I had one server crash, but I was busy with other stuff during most of the queues, hanging loading character lists, and other problems.

Even better, I met my goals for the headstart by reaching Lieutenant Commander as a science officer and requisitioning a Nova class science vessel. Here’s my alien Bryn Aen, a Kae from Nalyl-6, at his promotion ceremony and his ship the U.S.S. Grace.

Lt. Commander Promotion Ceremony

U.S.S. Grace, Nova class science vessel

Launch

Launch day seems to have been pretty smooth for everyone, it definitely was for me.

My one complaint getting started was that D2D didn’t bother to email me that my key was available until nearly 6pm, by which time I’d already checked my D2D account page, registered the retail key, and was in the game playing. I had no problems logging into the website and registering my key from the link on the home page, although it is odd that the same link isn’t on the account page. The redemption method through the in-game store is a bit odd, but I was already used to this from playing Champions.

Bryn in his Original Series era uniform.

The whole week has been pretty smooth up until Friday and the weekend. While I still haven’t seen any queues, I did get some pretty frequent disconnects during missions (mostly Sunday for myself), and there were several unscheduled maintenances (which means the server crashed). All in all a typical MMO launch, although definitely toward the LotRO end of the scale and not the Anarchy Online end.

Hopefully the hardware upgrade Cryptic has been promising is in place before this coming weekend and resolves their stability issues.

Second Impressions

While definitely not a review, these really aren’t first impressions either since I was in the closed and open betas. That said, I have started to get into content I hadn’t experienced in the betas including spending more time with the Tier 2 ships. The game really starts to get more interesting once you upgrade from the light cruiser everyone starts with. The episode missions also start to develop more story. Of course if you just click through dialogs looking for the objective, you’re missing out on a good portion of the experience.

In the end, I’m having fun. When I sit down to play, I always seem to end up in Star Trek before any other game. Of course this is pretty regular for my during the honeymoon period for any game. Long term I can easily see spending time popping in to play some fleet missions or deep space encounters just for the fun of blowing some ships up.

In case you’ve been away from the internet for a few days, Star Trek Online went into open beta. A lot of good information has already been posted, so I’m not going to repeat it here. Instead I just wanted to give my impressions from the closed beta and my expectations for open beta, and my plans for launch and the live game.

My Bias

Like Werit and Pete, I’m a fan of Star Trek. I’ve seen all of the shows (although I’m young enough to have watched TOS in reruns only) and the movies. My favorite two series are TNG and Enterprise (except for that crappy opening theme music they did). My favorite captain is Picard, my favorite character is Data, and I never hated Wesley Crusher. I’ve played (I think) all of the Trek computer games, but I most enjoyed Star Trek: Armada.

U.S.S. Grace

Closed Beta Experience

I got my CB invite on November 24th, and have been able to play in most of the testing sessions the Cryptic has held between then and now. I played a Tactical Officer up to Lieutenant 6 (level 6 basically) twice and did a variety of patrols, episodes, and open missions. The space combat has been exactly what I wanted from day one. The ground combat was just ok, I didn’t hate but I didn’t love it.

Again if you want more details there are already quite a few good posts linked above.

Open Beta Expectations

Open beta started on January 12th, and two days in the game is under some epic level stress testing. For a game so many people claimed not to care about, there are a lot of players logging in. This makes for an excellent test for the February launch day flood, but I’m sure is frustrating for people getting their very first impression of the game. I hope and expect that the lag issues will clear up during the first week, both from players who were more interested in sight-seeing leaving and from Cryptic improving the code and server infrastructure.

I never saw any of the open beta day 1  issues of loading into a planet instance as your ship, or into space as your captain, or beaming to a surface without your away team, in closed beta even when a new influx of players was causing lag and disconnects. My assumption is that these issues are caused by a massive influx of open beta players. This seems to be correct, since on the second day of open beta most of these issues weird loading seem to have gone away. Now I’m just seeing disconnects, some slow loading screens, and some rubber banding.

Plans for Live

I am happy with what I’ve experienced so far in closed and open beta. There are still bugs and rough edges to the game, but it feels no less complete or buggy to me that Fallen Earth was when it released a few months ago. Based on my closed beta experience, I’ve pre-ordered the Digital Deluxe edition from Direct2Drive. I’m planning to spend at least six months on the game, maybe more depending on what kinds of subscription deals Cryptic offers. The only thing I haven’t decided is if I’m keeping my EVE subscription during that time.

If you’re in the open beta feel free to send me a tell or a friend invite, Captain Kae@bluekae.

Leave me a comment if you have any questions about the game or are curious about how it compares to another MMO.

On Wednesday, the UPS guy dropped off my copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum.

I’ve been able to put about five or six hours into the game so far, which means I’ve seen most of the basic gameplay including a boss battle or two.  I was pretty happy with the demo and I was hoping the game would be as fun.  I have been surprised and thrilled to find that the full game is better.  This is the best Batman game that I’ve every played.  It does an amazing job of delivering the experience of being Batman, like Spiderman 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction did for their respective characters.

Tycho at Penny Arcade sums up my feelings well:

We wrapped up Batman yesterday, and it was unrelenting in its quality. I hope you already know that for yourself – that you have maneuvered its perils and triumphs firsthand, and are aware that developer Rocksteady has delivered a cornerstone experience that defines what the medium was about in the year of our Lord two-thousand and nine.

I especially like the description of this game as having unrelenting quality.  The opening cut scene, the voice work, the animations, the mid-game cut scenes, the mechanics, the boss fights, everything I’ve seen and played so for in this game has been excellent.

If you’re a Batman fan, this is a must buy.

In the division of household chores between my wife and myself, I am the one tasked with mowing the lawn.  I can’t complain about it too much, since it only needs to be down for six months out of the year (as opposed to laundry), and it takes my only about an hour to do the front, the back, and trim with a weed-eater.  Despite all of that, I don’t like lawn-care, or gardening, but  I love Plants versus Zombies.

This game was not on my radar until I heard an interview with Jason Kapalka on the Gamers With Jobs Conference Call 133.  I bought it on Steam for $10 ($9.99), although you can also get it directly from PopCap but it’s listed as $19.95.

I’m not going to do any kind of in-depth review because I’m having too much fun playing (4.8 hours according to Steam).  Plus Syp over at Bio Break already did a better job than I could have.  I will say that the sense of humor and quirkiness reminds me of World of Goo.

Update – Destructoid also has a review up if you want something even more detailed or just to see some screenshots.  You can also find a demo on both the Steam and PopCap sites.

I haven’t been to Ered Luin since the game launched.  My first character was an Elven Hunter on Gladden that I got to 15 during the head-start week.  I ended up re-rolling a Man Hunter on Landroval after I read on the forums that it  was going to be the unofficial role-play server.  So it’s been nearly two years since I’ve spent any time there.  I have an Elven Rune-keeper, Calenel, that I’d started but only played to level 8, so Book 7 seemed a good time to get back to him and see what kind of changes Turbine had worked out.

First thing of course is the XP curve change, I killed a rat and dinged 9.  Pretty nice.

Celondim has been streamlined a bit.  I remember a fair bit more running from Celondim to Nen Hilith and to Limael’s Vineyard and back again.  Now there is a quest NPC that sends you out to Nen Hilith and then is a small quest hub of four NPC’s that the mouth of the dell.  The same thing Limael is now at the tower on the hill just before her Vineyard instead of back in Celondim.  So now instead of two or three trips out and back, it’s one.

Duillond has a bit more running, but it’s still much improved.

As Calenel reached the teen levels, I noticed I couldn’t find any elites and had no trouble soloing all of the quests I was given.  I was especially surprised to find that you can solo all the way through the Prologue now.  I’m working through the Bree Prologue quests on a Man Warden character and there are still Fellowship quests towards the end of that chain.  I’m interested to see if Turbine changes the Bree and Shire prologue quests as well with the next content release.

Overall, the new zone is much more streamlined and enjoyable.  I’m not sure why the Prologue quests were made solo-able but it might point to a general shortage of low-level players in the Ered Luin region.  It’s certainly nice to be able to join a Fellowship as an option, but not be blocked.  I remember the Lone-lands being especially bad for that, I would login with a quest log full of Fellowship quests that no one was doing.

Growing up Batman and Spider-man were my two favorite superheroes.  My experience of both were limited to Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons.  Living in a small town, I didn’t get any exposure to comic books until I got to college.  I’ve enjoyed the recent reboot of the Batman movie franchise and I loved the Spider-man movies, although the last one was the worst of the three.  I’m also reading some of the classics.  Currently I’m reading Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, and I’m planning to get Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Long Halloween next.

So despite being a Batman fan, I wasn’t really looking forward to Batman: Arkham Asylum until I saw this video over at Destructoid.  If you like the Frank Miller era Batman, go watch this now.  The game play looks good, the atmosphere looks awesome, and the graphics look fantastic.  It sounds so minor, and it’s not something I’ve really though much about, but I think Batman’s cape is a major element to the character and this game really seems to have nailed it.

After recommendations from Bill at Dubious Quality and Darren at Common Sense Gamer, I finally made some time to download and trout the Mount and Blade demo through Steam.  Did I like it?  Yes.  How much?  I started with the tutorial around 9:30 pm, after my wife and son went to bed.  After the tutorial I started a game.  I played for a bit: got some quests, failed one and completed others, gained a few levels, got captured once.  I was having fun and then some part of my brain wondered, “What time is it?”  It was 2 am, and I needed to get up in 5 hours for work.  While this isn’t too out of the ordinary, I actually continued to play for another 30 minutes.  Just had to finish one more thing.

So yeah, I’m really enjoying the game.  I’ve since hit the level 7 limit of the demo and purchased the complete version.

I’m actually surprised I liked it so much. I’m a pretty shallow gamer.  Graphics are a big part of games for me, enough so that I don’t usually play older games or indie games.  Even when the gameplay is great, if the graphics aren’t good then I’m not interested.

My only complaint isn’t actually game realted.  When I purchased the full version, Steam didn’t convert my existing installation but re-downloaded the full game again.

So if you like RPG’s go get it.  It’s a little bit Oblivion and a little bit Total War.

Last time I posted, I was enjoying Fable 2 but not loving it.  It turns out that I didn’t have to restart my character.  Apparently I had turned off the game without saving my progress so the marriage and a couple of evil actions I had performed were undone.

After sinking fifteen more hours into the game, I can now say that I’m loving it.  I think the major problem was getting over the initial learning curve.  There are so many activities, with very little structure, that you can get to a point where you are missing some expressions that you need but haven’t yet gotten.  That’s how I got into the situation where my character was married, his wife was constantly asking for sex, yet he hadn’t picked up the social action needed.

Having completed the sortyline as a good/pure character.  I’m working through the story again as an evil character.  I haven’t decided yet is he’s going to be totally corrupt or not.

The story itself is very good and there are several interesting moral choices that come up when playing.  Some choices even have game play repercussions.

After a great first day, I was looking forward to playing again.  While I did spend some time with my hunter, I did not get a chance to play my Warden any further or create a Rune-Keeper.

With my hunter I did finish the Dwarven Expedition quest line, which is gone once you unlock Moria, and several more chapters of the Book 1 quest.  My initial encounter with the Watcher was fun, and the session play flashback to the fall of Khazad-dûm was excellent.  I also received my first legendary item.  When you get your first weapon, in my case a bow, you have to get it identified.  For me, this involved a trip to Thorin’s Hall.  I’m hoping that other classes don’t have to make that same trip, since it is about as far away from the Walls of Moria as you can get.

In Thorin’s Hall, I identified and equiped my bow and then slotted some settings, gems, and runes to add some different bonuses to it.  Slotting these items into the weapon is semi-permanent since you can’t get them back out without having the weapon reforged, although you can slot someting new but you’ll lose whatever is currently in that slot.

After your legendary weapon is ready, then next step is to get it to level 10 by fighting anything that will give you experience.  I mapped back to Echad Dûnann and picked up several quests to get started on levelling my bow.  Like with a new character, the first few levels with a new item come pretty quickly, then the experience curve gets a little steeper.