MauriceBastard – MRAAKTAGON

night 2: excitement failure

no man’s sky is a bad game. after 2 more hours of play for a total of 5 hours there is jack shit going on. the procedural nature of all the planets means they are all more the same than different. i can already feel the desire to quit this game. (though there is a small voice saying play some more because you may find some new shit)

the game is becoming more and more boring exponentially. if the first couple of hours of play could be BUILT upon no man’s sky would be a HIT, instead it almost immediate becomes repetitive and dull as shitcake.

this game is going to have to pull off a miracle to not be considered a complete and utter failure.

i could talk in deal about all the shitty stuff in the game(combat, resource management, doing the same search and find shit over and over) but you can just search youtube for reviews and there are plenty of them that talk about how the game is shite.

i’m not going to report anymore on no man’s sky. it’s not worth playing or talking about. there are 1000’s of other games that are carefully crafted experiences which are worth everyone’s time.

hello games, never again will i purchase your shit.

NMS Night 1: Impossible Expectations

no man’s sky on PS4 has no install. wtf. no install. after playing so many games on ps4 and getting used to a 10-15min install process, NMS has no install. that was the first signal that there was no MEAT in NMS. SURE the game is procedural so you’d expect the game to be lean, but ZERO install? red flag. a 1GB patch did install, so i’m gaming on v1.03 of NMS. there was no manual in the game case. fuckthat for 60$ plus tax i want a unless manual! hello games is making hand over fist moneyhats i guess. i mean 10 people studio, sounds like they stayed independant, didn’t take dev money from SONY, so like let’s say hello games is getting like 20$ per copy sold for NMS. i bet they sold at least 500k copies, which is like 10 million bucks. or a million a person for 3+ years work on the low side. what does that matter? if you charge full price for game you need to give the player full price trimmings. this is what will come out in the press and with fans over and over, is NMS worth the full $60 price. after 3 hours last night i’d say for most players NMS is overpriced.

it’s a survival/exploration game. that should be said by the developer over and fucking over. that is what the game is. there are other games that do the same thing but don’t hide behind the whole “infinite universe” shit. from 3 hours of play i’m already seeing how in this “infinite” sandbox the similarities between locations (planets/moons) will be rather HIGH. that is disappointing if not expected. their procedural content generation technique is NOT designed new types of basic animal locomotion for example, no it is just using basic models like two-legged creature, four-legged creature, ooooh and yep you guessed it six-legged creature. and these creatures, what the fuck do they do, NOTHING. shit they don’t eat, shit, attach each other, mate, etc. they just are there, 3-4 at at time as background. ya sometimes they are hostile to you and you have to beat them back which feels like SHIT. the FPS combat on planets feels like shit and then you are shooting some little crab thing and it feels like stupid shit. you’ll never see TRULY fantastics creatures, like that monster from The Thing, Falor from The Neverending Story, Alien(s) from the Alien series, etc. the devs didn’t have the resources to create really fantastical types of creatures, nor the time / processing power to properly animate them and breath life into them with interesting AI. OF COURSE I’VE ONLY PLAYED 3 HOURS SO WTF DO I KNOW BUT THIS IS MY BOLD PREDICKTION. the creatures in the game will be super fucking boring and hollow.

survival from the very start! little to no tutorial showing what you should try to do. this is a strength because you a freaked out about how to even survive right out the gate. i have not died yet, but many people have immediately and talked about that experience online. that is excellent.

no one told me that killing plants/animals was “bad” with some shitty little tutorial messages. you find out that when you kill shit causing omnipresent sentinels to come and investigate with little scanner bots, if you keep killing shit while sentinels scanner bots are watching you, the bots start attacking thus a cycle of escalation like getting stars in grand theft auto begins. okay that is fine and works to add more consequence to your actions. you can’t just fucking kill everything you see without getting fucked by the the robot guys. okay fine. you find that out yourself while playing. perfect.

far as i could tell right away are tasked with repairing your ship, which requires collecting elements(iron, plutonium etc). you can mine shit with laser gun omnitool thing. that is fine. you can send out a scan pulse to find the shit you can mine. okay that is fine. the graphics of the planet you start on feel okay, they feel kinda low budget/procedural in nature.

SOUND, very meh. the music is okay but nothing in the ambient sounds of the planet i was on made it seem very alien.

the weather was clear and cold i think. you have to manage a resource which is your spacesuits power to shield you from either extreme cold or extreme heat. if the environment shield goes to zero, you start taking damage i imagine. i never let it go all the way down to find out though. charging your heat/cold shield takes the yellow elements.

TAKING DAMAGE. yes you take damage from being attacked and also just walking around over time, and you fix that game by consuming RED resources, which are elements like Carbon which you get by mining planets or killing animals. BUT you can also use a element like plutonium to heal yourself i think because it is red. i think, can’t really remember but there seems to be some leeway in what you can use to “heal” your character guy.

i think there is a combat shield or something, but i’m not sure really. something that sops up the first couple hits before they start doing real damage, but i’m not sure because there wasn’t a tutorial to explain and the game comes with no fucking manual.

you can’t just press one button on the controller to heal, you have to open a menu, click on which thing to repair(heal), which opens another menu and choose which element/item you are going to use. this is difficult to do when you are running away from something or being attacked as you still stop dead in your tracks to process this action. THAT IS FINE it adds tension and causes you to make sure your shit is fixed up nice before you try to explore something that might be dangerous.

you can name stuff you discover. other players will someday share the joy when they visit worlds you’ve pissed all over with words.

No Man’s Sky: TITS or GTFO

gaymers everywhere have wanted the top to come off No Man’s Sky ever since the game was teased back in 2013 at the VGX extended night of game commercials and press jacking off ‘awards’. a PERFECT tease. have you experienced a perfect tease before? something that gets your cock/clit hard as steel? that feeling of INTENSE anticipation? YEP that feeling is what happened all the fucking way back in 2013 for me and many other gamers for No Man’s Sky. fuck i bought a PS4 because for a time it was suggested that Sony had scooped up NMS as a exclusive for the console, though originally it was going to be PC, or some shit but then it was going to be PS4 first then at some later time PC, fuckitall now it’s on PS4 3 days before the PC release. i digress, NMS launches TOFUCKINGMORROW.

okay, you don’t give 3 fucks about NMS because as you keep telling everyone, based on the trailers of the game you’ve seen NMS looks like a fucking boring gayme. that’s fine, stick to your CoD or macho Dark Souls masturbations, you’re not part of the target audience. trolling rock hard NMS fans is easy as slapping a child for making too much direct eye contact with the disabled.

NMS does not appear to be the work of jesus or peter molonyx. thankfully on the later. the devs of NMS have offered details about the game in a mostly restrained fashion, never over promising about the reality of what you can do in the game. the devs have hinted at things without spoiling what could prove to be a fun learn as you go exploration situation. the devs of NMS hinted that the game world of NMS is large (procedural generated galaxy or universe) but never did they say horse shit crazy stuff like pete molonyx is notorious for(and always failing to deliver). thank you devs of NMS, i think you should be honored for not overhyping your product. the fans are doing all that shit for you as they will/should.

a “big” game made by like 12 or so people, hyped to the MOON by fans. NMS releases tomorrow and i will give some daily reports on what the game is like. i will let you know from my hands on impressions from playing 2-3 hours night, how a middle aged married man with child plays games.

OH, fuck i almost forgot, the devs to my knowledge have said ZERO about DLC for No Man’s Sky. how? is it because they will offer that shit at a later date? the devs have said they plan on bringing more content and features, though they said it in a way so that one thinks it will be at no additional cost. hurray for that if that turns out to be the case. perhaps Sony will be paying them to keep players buying PS4s to play the game. who knows. a game coming out in today’s DLC assraping market which has no day one DLC announcements is a fucking winner.

don’t think you can customize the sex of your character in the No Man’s Sky. shit. who knows for sure.

HALO 4 REVIEWED

console FPS. that phrase will make some people gag and puke, like a saturday night drunk. i clearly remember the first time i played halo 2 on xbox. it was horrifying trying to make a microsoft console controller do what i knew a mouse/keyboard could do so much better. i was playing a fucking FPS with a console controller, it was terrible, it was 2003 or 2004 i think. there were two HUGE BLACK xboxs linked with a cable of some kind and it was 4 v 4 on two tvs in separate rooms in one house. 4 players on one tv, a tv screen split 4 ways. that layout was HORRIBLE in comparison to the MANY LAN parties i had attended where each player had there own computer, monitor and mouse/keyboard. YA I GOT FUCKING HOUSED by these console FPSers most of the time because of my console controller problems, but my PC FPS tactics did translate pretty well and I was able to hold my own after an hour of play all the while hating the controller and most of the people i was playing with. console FPS people are different from computer FPS people.

in 2006 i picked up a xbox360 for gears of war because you could take a chainsaw gun and cut bad guys in half. some time later i picked up halo 3 and played that some, it was okay nothing great and the controls sucked in comparison to mouse/keyboard. i played it because i had a friend that was NOT a pc gamer and he wanted to multiplay that shit up. so we did.

in 2008 i played COD4 on the xbox360 and finally went full on gay for FPS on consoles. so easy to just play mutliplayer game after game, the console made the multiplayer portion of the game so easy that going back to PC networking options looked completely archaic. so ya FPS can work fine/better on a console in some respects though M/K control on the PC will always be more accurate/brutal.

oh ya, HALO 4 REVIEWED. i guess i would call HALO 4 the best the xbox 360 has to offer in the halo bag. BUT LET’S BREAK DOWN THE OFFICAL KEY FEATURES OF HALO 4 ACCORDING TO AMAZON.COM!

Key Features

– The Reclaimer Saga Begins: Experience the dawn of an epic new Halo adventure, solo or split screen with up to three friends.

yep, sure like me some options playing the ENTIRE store co-op. but uh, the story is not very epic. it’s a linear who the fuck care’s affair where you are just ushers from shooting gallery to shooting gallery. why i love it so much worries me, i do love it but i know in my heart it’s pretty mindless. i think it works so well for coop because it’s so simple.

-Go Beyond the Story: Halo 4’s Infinity Multiplayer features a vastly expanded suite of multiplayer modes, weapons, vehicles, armor abilities, a new loadout and Spartan-IV player progression system.

CALL OF HALO’D. yes the multiplayer mode is your industry standard xp/upgrade slog. i’ve played about 4-5 hours of it not nearly enough to dig into all the customization options and i most likely never will play long enough to experience all of the “player progression system”. that sounds pretty geyh. yet again what i’ve played of multi is giggle inducing fun. i like the crazy vehicular combat, dude getting mowed down from heavy turret fire or run the FUCK over. it’s all easy to understand and less of a gawddamnedclusterfuck like in the BattleField games. what i mean to say here is a suck at battlefield games and with little or no effort i do well in halo 4. you tell me what that fuckin means about the games.

– Spartan Ops: Extend your campaign experience in a massive-scale adventure that builds upon the “Halo 4” Campaign. Receive a weekly series of cinematic episodes on Xbox LIVE followed by new gameplay missions, played solo or cooperatively with up to three friends – effectively delivering two campaign experiences in one game!* (*Online multiplayer and Spartan Ops missions require Xbox LIVE Gold membership (sold separately). System requirements forthcoming. See www.halo4.com)

sure sure sure, i like this part. i’ve played about 3hrs with my friend and it was nice easy fun blasting shit up all over the place. it works well and there is a metric shit ton of content being released, 5 new maps every week for fuck if i know how many weeks. it will take months of playing 2hrs a week with my friend to get through it all. massive-scale? no so much it’s bigger but not fucking massive, perhaps has massive as the xbox360 can produce without shitalloveritself. two campaigns? they reuse some/all of the maps from the main campaign in spartan ops so this is kinda a fucking lie but only internet assburger dickjags complain about that misleading key feature.

– War Games: Battle the competition in fresh, immersive new game modes and strategies.

this is pure marketing asspeak. nothing in this game is that fresh/new. it’s very HALOY which MOST of the internet halo geeks are happy to smoke.

– Track your groups, stats and scores on HaloWaypoint.com

stats. fine sure stats. my e-penis is larger then your internet butt hole will accommodate, see! see right here! this e-dick is much too massive and would split your brown starfish into uneven pieces. surgery may be required.

– Edge-of-your-seat Entertainment: Immerse yourself in Halo 4’s graphics, sound and epic game play including a mysterious and deadly new class of enemies* (*Online multiplayer and Spartan Ops missions require Xbox LIVE Gold membership (sold separately). System requirements forthcoming. See www.halo4.com)

graphics are TOP notch. this can and will not be fucking understated. the shit looks like doom3+rage with a solid FPS. okay you PC GAMING CUNTS halo 4 is not as good looking as current PC games played on 1500$ computers, but shit the xbox is 200$ and old and fuck and halo 4 rides the xbox like a FUCKING CHAM-PEE-YOEN! we are seeing GREAT PROGRAMING AT WORK and should be happy some nerdgod programmers are still milking that sweet xbox teet for me. i have multiple times stopped during single player to have a slack jawed look around like a cleatus, marveling at the graphics. i’m pretty sure the designers are paying homage to doom3 with some of the spaceship interiors and rage with some of the air landscapes, that is OKAY BY ME.

NOW LISTEN HERE PEOPLE! so you bought a xbox360. you are a poor person so you didn’t get a hard drive with your xbox. you are poor and you pay for xbox live gold access every year. you are poor and bought a 60$ xbox game and now you want to play this $60 game on your $200 xbox that has a internet connection, at least another $40 bucks a month and use your $60 a year xbox live gold access for some multiplayer HALO 4! oh you are too poor you cunt, you can’t play multiplayer HALO 4 on the xbox without installing the second DVD to the xbox hard drive which you are too POOR to purchase. on the back of the HALO 4 case you are told about this in the smallest possible writing. (you can now use any 8 or 16GB usb 2.0 flash drive instead of a offical xbox hard drive for game installs so you have to be too poor to buy this even). i’m sure some poor xbox players got pissed the fuck off when they could not play multi on the day they bought HALO 4 because they couldn’t install disc2. WHAT THE FUCKALL EVER! if you have a xbox360 with no harddrive you should not even be spending money on xbox shit at all. just stop breathing now.

HALO 4 is a great xbox360 game and one that should be owned by all xbox360 peeps.

HALO 4 is a 1 on said official binary scale.

Kingdoms of Amalur: The Same’maning

I LIKED the demo. I bought the game. The demo SOLD me on the game. I especially enjoyed the combat. The fighting felt solid and fluid. I had control of the action and it mattered that I timed my blocks, dodges and attacks. I was playing Skyrim at the same time and was amazed at how much better the combat felt in Amalur. The skill choices in Amalur are spread out over three main character types. These skill trees seemed cool and interesting in the demo. The game let you spread your skill points over the three skill trees, never locking you into any particular path (this is the first problem and you’ll find that out much later). So as I said, I LIKED the demo. That is where I should have stopped myself I think.

Insert EA rant: People this is a EA game. FUCK YOU EA. I can safely say I will not buy another EA game ever. When I pay 60 dollars for a game I don’t want to be reminded about DLC EVERY FUCKING TIME I START THE FUCKING GAME EA! I don’t want to see that fucking STAR by the Downloads menu item in the main menu for the game EVERY FUCKING TIME I PLAY! YES I SEE EA THAT YOU WANT ME TO SPEND MORE FUCKING MONEY! YES I SEE EA AND NO I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING BUY ANYMORE EA SPACEPISS! EA GET THAT GOD DAMNED STAR OFF MY SCREEN YOU FUCKING COPORATE FUCKASSES!

So here’s how Amalass plays. You’ll play the game for about 3-4hrs and more or less at this point you done EVERYTHING in the game. From this point on you’ll be playing a rehashing of more or less the same enemies, quests and find similar loot for the next however many hours you choose to spend playing. AND YOU CAN SPEND A SHIT TON OF HOURS PLAYING THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER. I was maybe 20hrs in when I finally stopped with the non-main quest shit and just powered right through the main quest in 6hrs. I didn’t need to level up anymore and the game was fucking so gawd damned easy on normal. I just got to a point in the game where I was fucking bored and upset with how generic and shitty everything was feeling and said, “Okay, how about now I just win this shitty game.” And so I did, I followed only the main quests, running from yellow circle objective marker to yellow circle objective marker, skipping all the useless dialogue, fighting the same fights over and over and won.

Yes you get more skills on your way to the fucking boring ending but the new skills don’t do anything that great! I got a crowd control skill that I had to use over and over as a melee fighter. Unlocking shit skills that have to be used is a GAY! Where is my choice now? I level up and if I don’t use these new skills I lose. Fucking dumb. AND if I do use them I win instantly. The game is balanced in this strangely perfect way, when you are doing the “right” thing the game is insanely easy and quickly becomes boring after your 10-12th victorious battle.

OH ya I tried to play a fight/thief character, it FAILED. Once I respected and put all my skill points into the fighter tree I instantly became 100% more deadly. ? Why the fuck let me break my character by spec’ing into two or SHIT three trees at once? Is that some way of making the game cooler? Here gamer, put points into any tree you want. If you happen to use only one tree, BINGO you’re good! If you experiment with using multiple trees, FUCK YOU, you’ll hopefully get around to respec’ing into one tree only and quickly see HOW FUCKING WRONG YOU WERE!

The game is worth 10$ tops! Normal people will play 4-6 hours and stop cuz that is all the fun there is in the game. Shitty buffet trough feed americans will play all the fucking way through and buy all the DLC and want more. This game is the mount everest of mediocrity and I climbed all the way to the fucking top and took a GIANT piss on the dead diabetes ridden gamer corpses that littered the peak.

All that said I did craft a fucking KICKASS great sword that did 50+ more damage than anything I found in the game, so that was cool. The crafting system was cool. The fighting system is cool for 4-6hrs. The animations/enemies are very Todd McFrainer or whom ever the fuck that comic guy is. The world art is okay, very wow’ish but it’s fine. I can’t help but think a great number of people wasted a HUGE amount of time making this incredibly so so game.

HYBRID IS EVERYTHING MUTE HATES. PLAY IT WITH ME

use this link to sign up for the xbox360 beta HERE and check video of the game here . mute i’m sorry for the post about a gaym that would be better if you could play it with a mouse and a keybOArd.

L4D2 Run 2

Here’s a video of US playing l4d2 from earlier this week. L4D2 is still the best coop PC game available.

diablo 3 beta rant 2 – I PREFER ZERO HIT LAG

so i was wrong. the hit lag i have seen in the diablo 3 beta exists to some extent in diablo 2 single player offline. SOOOOO it’s not just the shitty new DRM that causes hit lag in diablo 3 beta, it’s ??? maybe just multiplayer code in general. how can i know this? i sparked up torchlight, ZERO HIT LAG. yep torchlight has zero hit lag! someone make me a fucking tshirt please that states, “I PREFER ZERO HIT LAG” so i can mail it to every employee working on diablo 3.

here’s a link to the video that compares all three gaymes.

but don’t take my FUCKING word for it, after you play diablo 3 beta play some torchlight. which gaym feels most solid?

now before you go and blow your WAD, i’m not saying torchlight is better then the diablo 3 beta because of this single issue, BUT torchlight does prove you can eliminate the HIT LAG.

diablo 3 beta or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the drm

i’ve now played all 5 characters through to the end of the diablo 3 beta. overall i’m impressed and sad at the same time. i will buy the game when it comes out and learn to love the drm.you will feel the lag! you’ll fire up diablo 3. within the first 1hr of play you will feel the lag. you will feel disconnected from the action while playing single player. you’ll get hit by a monster and wonder, “wtf, i was clear of that hit” yet you will still get hit because the calculation for that hit happened on the blizzard diablo 3 servers and not your computer.

this is basically what happens. you run up to a monster and punch it. you see the monster wind up their attach which clearly tells you to move your character out of the fucking way. you move your character. the blizzard diablo 3 servers are busy calculating your inputs and the monster’s attach. data is racing back and forth across the internets which are all clogged up with japanese rape dungeon porn and “I’m at the McDonald’s obeying my child’s cries for FAT and SUGAR” facebook updates. mean while your local diablo 3 game client shows your character moving away from the monster, clear from danger. you think to yourself, “i’m so smart, i dodged that attack”. BAM! the hit calc finally arrives from the blizzard diablo 3 servers. now your simple single player game interaction sometimes feels like buttered SHIT.

Video of the laggy monster hits.

BUT you keep playing! you can’t fucking stop. you play AROUND the lag. why? why is there lag in a single player game in the first place? Digital Rights Management! The only way to lock down games on the PC today and have an appreciable effect on piracy is to make them some kind of MMO requiring a player to be online all the time while at the same time keeping a good portion of the game code on the publishers servers away from the players(haxxors). all to prevent you the consumer for stealing the game. we all can thank CHINA for diablo 3 being online only. CHINA pirates the FUCK out of everything, especially computer games. for years now game devs in CHINA have been forced to make their games into MMO’s, and not just any MMO either FREE TO PLAY MMO. AKA here’s a shitty demo of our game, to really enjoy this game here are a ton of MICRO transactions to spend money on to get a full game experience, we (the devs) hope you end up spending shit tons of money 1-5$ at a time without really noticing that you are paying more over the long run. ALSO we devs get people who would have normally stole the game to drop a couple bucks while they try it out perhaps. THANKS A LOT CHINA! of course piracy exists in the US and A and Europa too and fucking Russia, don’t leave those criminals out of this.

blizzard knows all this. blizzard makes the most popular MMO. blizzard sees diablo 2 pirated UP THE ASS ALL OVER TOWN by the russians and chinese. blizzards spends 10+ years making diablo 3, spending millions and millions of development dollars. blizzard is completely OKAY with giving the paying players an occasionally laggy single player experience to get their MONEY back and make a clean and tidy profit. it’s that fucking simple ASSHOLE CONSUMERS! (and yes someday the haxxors will make rouge diablo 3 servers to play on)

so i hope you enjoy lag while playing by youself. i hope you enjoy reading books or playing iPad games when you travel to a place without internet or when your home connection gets fucked up and goes down because diablo 3 does not have an offline mode, if it did PIRACY MOTHERFUCKRS!

i’m almost too tired to talk about the gameplay in the diablo 3 beta after all that shittalk. diablo 3 beta is fun, pretty, gory, entertaining, addictive and DIABLO. i just really hate the fact that Blizzard knows they can make diablo 3 into a DRM ridden poison pill and still sell millions of copies.

okay i have the following details to report from the diablo 3 beta:

0. GIBBS. monsters for the most part die wonderfully. blood and puss fly around, splooshing on the ground when monsters get smashed apart. chunks of monster roll and bounce enchanted with the damage type that killed the monster, flaming, bricks of ice, oosing poison, or glowing with arcane damage. RAG DOLL RAG DOLL RAG DOLL, you will be seeing too much RAG DOLL. it’s sad but true, rag doll is overly used in monster deaths. i’d much rather see shit chopped up or knocked down on the ground from a heavy hit then see it fly across the screen in the unnatural rag doll motion that we’ve been seeing since 2003 or there abouts. there is everything inherently dumb about seeing a killed zombie do a chart wheel.

1. moving items around from your characters backpack to the paper doll or to the stash can feel laggy. it doesn’t always feel laggy, but sometimes you can feel the fact that you are just moving bits around on the diablo 3 servers when you are moving shit around in your inventory. this is something MMO’ers are used to and blizzard really doesn’t care about non-MMO’ers non-mmo’s to blizzard are just pirates that don’t spend enough money to be considered good trusted consumers. so here i am, a paying consumer whore, just moving shit around in my backpack and it takes a second to register the move, LAG, thanks to my always online single player game.

2. loot drops. there’s a good amount of it in diablo 3 beta, but something feels off. it’s tuff to say how loot will be doled out by blizzard in diablo 3 when diablo 3 is finally released, but in the diablo 3 beta it feels a little OFF. balancing the loot drops and a “HEALTHY” online diablo 3 economy will be difficult. who knows if it will suck, let’s hope it doesn’t fucking suck. but again, if you are just going to play single player and don’t care about trading items or the auction houses, will loot drops be balanced for single player only type of play? blizzard has been insisting since day one that diablo 3 will be completely solo’able, meaning a person can play the entire game by themselves and have “fun”. blizzard ALWAYS follows this statement up with, “BUT multiplayer is way more fun then single player and multiplayer is really where the game shines!”. PR BULLSHIT! who cares what the game developers or marketers want, there are a SHIT ton of diablo players that want to play by themselves. i think blizzard doesn’t like single player gamers because they don’t spend as much money as MMO addicted gamers and these single player loner gamers are most likely pirates, so why bother trying to balance the loot drops for single player? just make the sure the loot drops DONT break the multiplayer trading and the auction houses. even without taking a negative stance you should admit to yourself and baby jesus that blizzard’s priority for loot drop balancing will be for multiplayer, which in simple terms means less rare(good, cool, fucking radical) drops for gamers playing solo.

3. items items items? which are better? blizzard has attempted simplify item usage in diablo 3. it feels simple and not as cool as diablo 2. it is easier to understand how items benefit your character and thus the items don’t feel mysterious/interesting and thus kinda gay. jay wilson is winning his war in dumbing shit down to make the game unrbeakably fun and EASY for “gamers” to understand and play. jay has some valid points about how the itemization in diablo2 was broken, but i’d say the “ease of use above complexity” mantra has taken a toll on the items in diablo 3 in comparison to the mystery that diablo 2 brought to the table with items. until i play the full game i can’t say for sure if this is just a problem with the beta. the crafting is basic min-max gambling. you break down shit you don’t want in an antempt to roll new items that have the best random stats. it seems fun and should clean up the d3 economy nicely.

4. classes are they different? the devs for diablo 3 wanted each class to play differently and included the idea of each class having their own resource to manage. it works okay be it’s not THAT amazing in practice, all the d3 devs really did is remove mana potions and make characters either generate “mana” through attacking or via passive regen. SO what does this mean in gameplay? how is the wizard different the the witch doctor? not very different at these early levels, they both cast pretty much as much as they want and have fast regen resources. how is the barb different from the monk? not that different really. for all the talk about different resources making the characters play differently, it’s kinda a wash. i can’t help but think that PvP HAS influenced the character designs too much to the point where we don’t have unique characters, just caster or brawler. i’m happy with all the characters and can say the characters do appear to play a bit differently, but just a bit, it’s not a radical change moving from character class to character class.

5. graphics are a win. environmental graphics are fucking super nice. monster animations are great. monster dead animations are wonderful. they didn’t fuck this up at all.

i’m gunna play some more and do some video recording. hopefully i can show how the lag feels cuz it’s the only SUPER weak point for diablo 3 beta. once we get a chance to see how torchlight 2 handles, it’s possible diablo 3 will be purchased only because we MUST and once defeated in single player it may be abandoned to the hardcore nerds that want to loot farm.

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 9- another one bites the dust

shoedrinker got the permadeath from a pack of assholes on the last seal opening sequence before diablo shows up. it was that pack of fast demon fuckers. i got nervous and cornered and killed. see that fast pack must be avoided at all costs and drawn out into the large open area, and AND you must have your avoid skill handy, i might have been able to leap to safty but my leap skill was buried somewhere… death came pretty damn fast.

just when i was thinking i’d get my first hardcore diablo fight, FUCKED. i think the other characters i have will get a bit of the grinding before they make an attempt.video of shoedrinker going lv20-26 here.

rest in peace shoedrinker