Rants and ramblings about games, life, and other stuff.
Archive for the ‘Rambles’ Category.
I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming Mass Effect 2 DLC, Lair of the Shadow Broker, ever since it was announced. Now that I’ve seen the video for it, I’m very very excited. It looks really good. I can’t wait for the 7th, although it would’ve been nice to have it for the holiday weekend.
Of course the burning question now is: what will happen with my Sheppard’s romances? He was with Liara in the first game, but now he’s with Tali.
Making a new hero in Champions Online usually happens for me in one of two ways: either I have an idea for a name and then build a costume and powers around it, or I have a costume in mind that suggests a certain power build and a name.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about a new hero, but so far I’ve not been able to come up with either a name or a costume that I like. His powers will be primarily from the Archery but with some Supernatural additions, so far including Command Animals and Soul Mesmerism. I’ve gone through the character creator several times hoping that something would click for me, but no luck.
If I can come up with a good name then the costume should come to be pretty easy. So, I’m crowd sourcing my imagination. If you have any ideas, please leave it in the comments.
As Stargrace reminded me on Twitter, NaNoWriMo is only two months away.
Now last year I decided to join on the second day. I had no outline or story idea, done no preparation, and was already a day behind. It didn’t turn out well. Still, I don’t regret it at all and I do think that I learned somethings.
So, this year I’m going to give it another shot, only this time with some actual preparation.
Champions Online is one year old, and Cryptic is running a special event this week to celebrate.
From September 1st (today!) through the 7th you can play Champions Online for free. You don’t even have to have purchased a boxed copy, you just have to register an account on their site.
This is even better than the normal demo because it is unrestricted. This means you’re not locked to the Qularr invasion crisis, but can experience the full game or as much as you can fit into seven days.
If you decide to try it out and have any questions about how to play, feel free to ask me in-game, here, or on Twitter.
Controversies aside, I was excited to get my copy of the Limited Edition box for Elemental: War of Magic today. I’d already gotten my download code, so I’ve been playing, but I’ve been really looking forward to checking out the goodies that came with the physical copy. I’m a suckers for maps, so the inclusion of a nice canvas map was the main reason why I got it, and I’m extremely happy with the quality.
Quick update on the drama from last week, looks like the current 1.06 patch has corrected most of the issues that PC Gamer had.
You can see the pics here or in the slide-show below.
There were two drama’s this week that I got sick of really quickly.
The first thing was an article on Elemental by PC Gamer. Pete from Dragonchasers has already covered most of my feelings about Elemental, so I’ll leave it at that.
The second was the whole buying used games is piracy debate (and I’m using that word ironically). This whole thing was pretty off target, in my opinion. When I read Tycho’s post, I put the emphasis on the intent part of the statement and went on with my day. Then I got home and found half of the blogs in my RSS were talking about it in a completely different way from the way I understood his point. Since I’m so slow to post though, Tycho has already explained himself, so that’s that.
Moving on to more interesting stuff.
I’m reading the latest Mass Effect book, Retribution, and enjoying just as much as the prior two. This has started me jonesing to be back in that world, which is good because I still have DLC to finish. I had stopped playing halfway through the Firewalker DLC, so I finished that as well as the Kasumi missions. I was a bit disappointed that there was no real dialog on the ship with Kasumi outside of the missions, she does say some things, but she’s similar to Zaeed (which makes sense, but I was hoping for more). Her loyalty mission was still pretty fun though. I’m playing Overlord now, it’s the biggest DLC so far, and has a good mix of ground and driving sections.
I hadn’t originally planned to, buy I ended up buying SC2. Not to say that I was never going to buy it, but I had planned to wait until the sequels were out. I blame nostalgia and Twitter for my failure in self-control.
The funny thing about playing Star Craft 2, is that it has made me want to go back and play Dawn of War again. Ten years (or more) ago, when I played SC1, I’d never heard of Warhammer 40k, but now playing SC2, the similarities are is striking.
So, I’ve actually been playing a lot more DoW2 than SC2. I bought the Chaos Rising expansion during the last Steam sale, but hadn’t fired it up yet. Mostly this was because while I really enjoyed the original DoW2 campaign, the multi-player wasn’t as fun for me. This left me feeling a little cold towards the game. So I was pleasantly reminded of how much of actually enjoyed the single player when I fired up the expansion campaign. I’ve also started to enjoy the multi-player, I had a good night of CPU stomping in 2v2 with Oakstout, and I’m looking forward to trying Last Stand with Jayedub.
MMO-wise, I’ve just been dabbling. Played a little Champions yo check out the new update, popped into LotRO to get my house out of hock and catchup on my maintenance fees, and the rest of my time has been spent in STO. I made Vice Admiral, got my Discovery-class refit (my favorite looking ship in the game), and made Attaché in the Diplomacy ranks.
So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been writing quite a bit, but I’m having trouble publishing. Several times, this week, I’ve finished posts and just found no inclination to publish them. Apparently with venting, it’s enough to write it that I don’t need to share it, and honestly you’re not missing much.
I am curious though. If you blog, how much of what you write do you publish?
This is making me think about the dozen plus unfinished articles in my drafts folder. I really need to do some fall cleaning and either trash them or finish them.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Star Trek Online Season 2 was released yesterday. Tipa has a good overview of the update, and there’s a lot of detail in the release notes, so I don’t want to rehash it too much.
Two of the big highlights: skill cap (level) increase and diplomacy.
The skill cap was increased allowing for new ranks of Rear Admiral Upper Half (yeah I know but it’s canon) and Vice Admiral. In WoW-terms that’s a level increase from 45 to 51. There’s also new high level content to match, but I haven’t done any of it yet.
The big feature I’ve been excited about is the addition of the Federation Diplomatic Corps. Cryptic has added a diplomatic rank system to the game. There are seven new non-combat missions to Memory Alpha, Vulcan, Bajor, and Starbase 39 that are quite good (and include some branching). Unfortunately I haven’t gotten a chance to do any First Contact missions on the live server (Holodeck) since that requires the Attache diplomatic rank, which I haven’t earned yet. I have played a few of those on Tribble though and they were interesting, although I’ve enjoyed the investigations on Bajor and K7 (one of the missions that starts on Memory Alpha) more.
I also spent a lot of time scanning anomalies, which is not something new for me, but now that there’s a signal matching mini-game, those missions are a bit more interactive.
I’m planning a few non-spoiler, in character, write-ups of those episodes. Hopefully the first one will go up on Friday.
As Anjin noted recently, Cryptic has been very quiet about Champions Online since the Serpent Lantern update last month. I don’t mean that I was expecting another update, but just that it would’ve been nice to have an idea of where the dev’s were focusing for the next major patch to the game.
Thankfully Poz has released a State of the Game that outlines the planned Summer Update for August 17th and a sneak peak at the next adventure pack, The Demonflame.
Summer Update
Like the recent melee powers update that took place, Cryptic is also working on a revamp of the pet systems. This includes a more explicit way of controlling pets, an increase in the damage they do, and a new mechanic for keeping them powered.
I’ve not played with the pet powers at all, but I’ve heard that there are also problems with the pathing and having to resummon all pets when one dies. Hopefully these changes will help with those problems as well.
The Demonflame
Scheduled for the end of September, The Demonflame focuses on DEMON similarly to how The Serpent Lantern focused on Viper. We’ll be going to the Qliphotic realm and battling a new monster group. Check out the screenshots on the site.
Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.
The Steam Perils of Summer sale is over. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle on money spent at $70. For only $10 more than getting a single console game, I now own:
I’ve been torn about whether or not to get Borderlands since it first launched. As a co-op focused game, I couldn’t decide if I’d end up playing more with Xbox friends or PC friends, plus there’s always GamerScore to think about. At $11 (+$12 for all the DLC), it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, I saw a lot of my Steam friends getting it as well, so I figure there’ll be lots of people to play with.
I already own the original Witcher on DVD, but I bought the Enhance Edition anyway. This was purely out of laziness, now I don’t have to mess with patching the game when I reinstall it find the disc.
SupCom 2 and King’s Bounty are games I’d thought about getting at one point or another. I didn’t have a PC that would run SupCom2 well enough when it came out, and then when I had a PC that would run it, it was too old for me to buy at full price. King’s Bounty was one I wanted to buy when it launched but didn’t because of some DRM or retail issue, I can’t remember at this point.
Of all my purchases, Dawn of Discovery – Venice, was the only game I’d planned to buy soon. I really like Dawn of Discovery for city building, but I was waiting on getting the expansion until I’d finished a few more of my console games.
The rest of my purchases were all impulse buys: Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, Galcon Fusion, and the Introversion games. I’d demoed Audiosurf and Galcon before and liked them, but I’ve been out of a casual gaming mood for a long time now. Still at under $5 for each, they were worth adding to my library for whenever I was in the mood for a quick play session.
I haven’t played all of my purchases yet, but I did want to mention how surprised and thrilled I am with Beat Hazard. I picked this game up because it sounded fun and was only $2.50, but I didn’t expect to play it a bunch. It’s a shooter similar to Geometry Wars, but it uses your music collection to drive the gameplay. Oddly enough, it fills the same gaming niche for me that Rockband 2 does. Rockband is a game I play only once a month or so, but when I do, I play for a couple of hours. It’s a chance to listen to music that I like while also gaming. Beat Hazard is pretty much the same thing, only it’s an Asteroids-like shooter instead of a rhythm game. Unlike Rockband, Beat Hazard is quick to pickup and play for five minutes at a time, and I think it’ll become a part of my regular gaming-life.
Scratch Crackdown 2 off yesterday’s list.
I spent an hour with the demo and did not have fun. It may have just been a bad demo, the game may actually be just as great as the first one, but I’m not planning to order it until I see what some other gamer-friends think of it.
The demo really felt like they gave you a beginning of the game character and dropped you into the middle of the game.
