Not that this happens often, but there has been some actual pen and paper RPG that has dropped this year: couple Dresden Files games and one abortive session of Bulldogs! with tabletop forge using Google Hangouts. While the session was taking the piss due to it being just character creation, the tool proved to be pretty great and now they have a kickstarter (like everyone else) to make it better and better. I threw 35$ in because even that one night was worth it.
And speaking of D&D, that died the day 4th edition came out because the designers couldn’t stop for more than 10 minutes from playing WOW, 5th edition (the community edition) is still in the works and it looks um…yeah….they’re still playing WOW.
Hang or defenestrate, it makes no difference to me.
Thence, I got Bulletstorm off steam the other day for 19.99 and thought: alright, People can Fly is a pretty good shop based on Painkiller, and even though the main voice actor is the same guy from URBAN REIGN and a thousand other games, it couldn’t be that bad– and it’s not. Though it follows the whole “you are playing a movie” style, it’s fun and despite the whole redneck’s in space vibe (yet again), the dialog is snappy and filthy and far better than the embarrassingly strained Redneck’s in space babble of Starcraft 2.
However, like Dawn of War 2 and lots of other games I try to avoid for this reason alone, if you buy it from Steam you then have to sign in to play it on windows live. Like the true measure of gaming ennui, Diablo 3, Bulletstorm, a primarily single player game has an online all the time requirement? And WHY did this get pirated? Simply put, without Windows live the pirated version is a better experience than if you, like me, did the right thing and purchased the game legally for the PC. Now call me an idiot because I forgot my Windows live login first off, then apparently if someone else is logged in as you (like some childe watching my little ponies) you cannot validate your game or even play it. All of these things make sense, but of course, I just wanted to play the SINGLE PLAYER game and not be connected to the internet in any way. I don’t want achievements, I don’t give a goatsee about anyone seeing on my gamer tag that I have been playing Bulletstorm and finally it seems like it would be a crap multiplayer game, so I have no interest in that (which is sad because Painkiller’s DM was great!).
So to end this rant, I want to say that I do like Origin and Steam (of course) because they offer VALUE to me. Windows Live for PC offers absolutely nothing but total annoyance for all users.
Along with their recent price increase overall, Games Workshop changed their paint line again. This time it wasn’t a few colors here and there that were ‘retired,’ the entire LINE has been changed. Now I’m not a big fan of GW’s paints overall: they are water based so dry out way faster than other manufacturers– but they have been the foundation of my paint palette for decades now– so much so that I am now driving around to non-GW stockists who carry GW paint to try to find key colors that DO NOT HAVE AN EQUIVALENT PAINT COLOR in the new set (like bestial brown). You see, most GW stockists sent back their paints for free replacements, leaving the only place you can get the old paints to be stockists that are on the ‘outs’ (i.e. they carried GW stuff but are just trying to sell off what they have an not buying new stuff– or ebay/craigslist, whatever. Of course the prices will rise and rise.
This is not to say the new paint line is altogether bad, some of GW’s colors (especially their inks and metallics) are great stuff but to have no equivalents? That’s the DRIZZLIN SHITS I tell you what.
It’s sad when you go out and buy a game the first day it’s out, then just run out of time on the Xbox to get anywhere at all on it before it’s My Little Pony and fucking Calliou all over the place. Owning a M-17 game with kids around is the drizzlin’ shits, and Dark Souls has been added to the list of games like Crackdown 2 and Red Dead Redemption that I haven’t finished SPECIFICALLY because I cannot play with the kids even conscious in the house (they can hear the big death and cursing and I’ll turn around and both of them will be standing there while I’m shooting up a saloon or slapping some zombies around).
So the fact that this is coming out on Steam means I will actually get a chance to get my ass kicked by it over and over… and that’s a good thing. Now if I could only think of an excuse to why I haven’t finished GODHAND…
I’ve had some fun with D3 with two characters just over level 10, but it has problems, problems that might be OK if it were an MMO and I liked MMO’s. It’s not an MMO and the problems with latency, the rubberbanding and error 33, patching errors are just ridiculous, especially in (drum roll) single player. Your mileage varies I’m sure but to put it bluntly, D3 is not a very good single player game. It’s linear, it’s pretty boring so far except for the boss fights and seeing all the stuff in the environment you can blow up. This is par for the course with the Diablo series: they are not that great single player games– the Zyel mod was created specifically to give players that wanted a good single player experience a better one than could be gotten off vanilla Diablo 2. And, please, go back and try to play Diablo 1 without falling asleep in your chair.
Multiplayer– that’s where the game shines and while it’s been fun it’s been marred, of course, by lag– maybe acceptable in this early stage if the two core things people want out of the game are fulfilled: fun combat and fun item management. The former is OK. I’m still on the fence about it. The concept I want to talk around with D3 is the idea of RELATIVE fun. On it’s own, D3 is good, it’s not great, but when you put it up against Torchlight 2 it falls completely flat.
I reiterate some of my earlier posts– once you play Torchlight 2, it’s really tough to go back to Diablo 3’s slow, ponderous gameplay. It feels like going from fast paced hyper Gauntlet madness with craziness at every turn in Torchlight 2 to slow, static and, while visually appealing, fairly stagnant fighting in Diablo 3. The second point of fun, item management, is a fucking chore in D3. While I’m still low level, drops are shit and from what I’ve read and heard– it doesn’t get much better. The items so far are bland and overall the crafting really feels like a combination of Hellgate London and Titan Quest with all the breaking apart of items into more crap and crafting into….yay more of the same crap you picked up! Basically you take all your blue items and yellows you do not want, throw away the white items (they are totally useless in the game–and the grey items? what in the flying fuck are they doing in the game?), break the rest of them apart because they don’t fit your character and then take the sub items ( like subtle essence) to create some type of item with a reroll on the effects— in turn this item may not work out for your character so you break the produced item apart and when you have enough sub items again, you get another reroll which may or may not work out for you. There’s no way to influence the reroll (like a cube lock for example) There’s no path of crafting other than this that I’ve seen (sockets and jewels– though no runes or rune words). From what I’ve seen so far, it’s quite tedious. I made 11 or so belts and they all had almost exactly the same powers– nothing special, nothing that gives your character access to anything outside of his set of attacks (like a summon power for a barbarian).
Act 1? Nothing compared to D2’s act 1. It’s very short– it’s got one big boss at the end and that’s it (the Butcher). The fight is boring.
So now I sit waiting for a patch that looks like it’s going to take an hour to download and I’m thinking:
