Author: MauriceBastard

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 2

flyingassbang update  lv10-20

she made it. she’s not dead, yet. i’m a little more then halfway through act 2 with flyingassbang. i’ve only had 2-3 close calls that put her damn near death. these close calls stem from running into room full of baddies and getting hammered by ranged baddies and almost surrounded by melee baddies. simple rule of thumb, don’t fucking rush into rooms. with her lighting rez at 60% the most feared lightening enchanted fuckers don’t do shit to her.

i’m not found much in the way of good loot for her yet. i mean really nothing to brag about at all. the unique club that gives her 60% lightening rez is about the coolest shit she has, and she’s a sorc! i do have a nice 3 socket grey staff i want to put some runes in soon, but that’s about it. i don’t like that i have to get out some internet FAQ to find out what can be made with runes, that is gaytownusa. i’m glad crafting will be more ingame friendly for diablo 3.

when flyingassbang’s amazon hireling hit lv17 she got a sweet-ass rune/gemmed bow, 150 poison damage over 5 seconds and 8-12 fire damage. so while flyingassbang is freezing shit that little amazon woman hireling is mr. yuck fucking all the frozen enemies to death.

flyingassbang is mostly in the cold skill tree for now, with a bit of lightening and fire to help deal with any cold immune assbags that show up. she trys to keep Shiver Armor running at all times, helping protect her from any shitcakes that get close, while blasting away with Glacial Spike. She used Ice Blast for a while there, but switched to Glacial Spike when it became available. A bit of Frost Nova to help in crowds and a Static Field here and there on bosses.

is this the right way to play? use only 1-2 skills the entire time mostly? goddamn that seems broken, so badly broken. i very much am looking forward to using 7 skills in diablo 3, just beling able to use 6 different skills direclty without having to swap out right mouse button with a new skill will be great. when i played the d3 demo in 2010 i loved how the skills could be easily combo’d as you have directly keystroke access to them.

overall i enjoy this d2 hardcore mode a lot more then regular d2. you are forced to be careful about how you play. i do worry about not being able to get past duriel or having to grind up lv’s to beat him… we shall see what happens. mraak! it’s on to ShoeDrinker – lv10 Barbarian now.

d2 hardcore mraakaires – day 1

what the fuck is a man to do when diablo 3 is over a year away from being released? how about doing some hardcore diablo 2 runs, ya thats right, HARDCORE D2!

NOTE: i’ve never tried to play a hardcore character in diablo 2. this is my first time.

NOTE: i’m going to do my damned best to keep a diary of my progress playing single player hardcore characters here on mraaktagon.com

NOTE: i’m using diablo 2 v1.13c (the latest patch for diablo 2 at this time), plugy 10.00, i’m using some german 3dfx glide hack that lets you use the 3dfx setting with a video card that supports opengl or some shit (makes the game run better!) and that’s fucking it. i’m not going to install any cheats. if you think plugy is cheating that’s okay for you! the main reason i’m using plugy is for the shared stash.

NOTE: i’ve played each of the seven hardcore characters classes up to lv10 just to get this warmed up. no deaths yet. i will pick one of the seven to start with and play until death / or 10 lv’s are made, at which point i’ll switch to a new character. i’ll continue this 10 lv rotation until all 7 characters are dead. this allows me to stash items away for the other characters while ensuring i don’t get fucking bored playing one character class for too long.

so without further fucking around my 7 characters are,

FlyingAssBang – lv10 Sorceress
ShoeDrinker – lv10 Barbarian
SomeCallMeTim – lv10 Druid
BiotchLips – lv10 Assassin
DayLabor – lv10 Paladin
TugandRun – lv10 Necromancer
KunningLinguist – lv10 Amazon

i’m going to start with FlyingAssBang the sorceress. i think i’ve only beaten vanilla diablo 2 with the amazon, barb and assassin, but that was fucking years ago people.

here’s a link to a large image file that has all of FlyingAssBang’s stats at lv10 and all the items she’s using. i am not making some fucking proven build from some goddamned FAQ, i’m not a pro! i’m not going to use the plugy re-spec without making a good argument for doing so and clearly documenting the use or re-spec. i’m kinda scared about how i should spend points on this sorceress character. i think you just spend enough strength to get the armour you need, and get like 50 or so in mana, and the rest goes to vitality or someshit. but how about skills? shit i really have no clue, i am learning the fucking hard way, the hardcore hard way. okay off to play my lv10-20 as FlyingAssBang. i’ll post anything of interest back here, shit i have no fucking idea what i’m doing with this sorc build, i’ve got skill points scattered in all the tree’s already selected, that is just fucking terrible.

FUCKING HAPPY FUCKING NEW FUCKING YEAR 2011

Elemental: Where’s The Magic?

Elemental: War of Magic is now about one week old and up to v1.06 and is no where near balanced or complete, but hey it doesn’t really crash anymore. This game is getting glowing reviews from hard core fans because in the future it will have good mods and will be patched by the developer to deliver on the idea that it is the spiritually successor to Master of Magic. What the flying fuck is wrong with people? $50, that is what you just paid for the hope that the game is functional some day. Bullshit.

Put simply, this game plays like a jokeshop of broken concepts. To prove how broken the game is I played several games where I purposely upgraded my military only and won handily over the computer. I ignored the other 4 tech trees completely, save for getting level 1 diplomacy for road building. I only cast summon spells and won. I didn’t use something like 50 or so other spells because they are completely POINTLESS. The only thing you need to win are superior numbers of units, that’s it. A player putting more points into magic is just wasting capital, military trumps magic EVERY FUCKING TIME.

3 years to make this game. The developer spent 3 years to make a shitty CIV clone with useless features.

So here is the feature list from the Elemental website along with my comments to help explain the reality behind this turd:

“A strategy game in an RPG world.”

The most limited RPG world because of the worst balancing problems EVER! You start the game with one “super” unit, your sovereign. This character has 8-10 stats you can lv up over the course of the game as you win battles. BUT only one stat allows you to gain mana and thus cast more spells per turn, breaking your choice of what to lv up. So you just put all your points into the mana stat every time you level. And then magic is really useless except for the summonable units, so what the fuck? BROKEN, zero RPG elements. You can give your character items, in fact you can give them UNLIMITED rings and necklaces that provide bonuses for combat. But who cares because you never really want to use your RPG style characters in combat, its MUCH better to just use the military units. BROKEN.

“Randomly Generated Maps.”

As far as I can tell this is true and works. The game has two modes for viewing the map, a 3d view and 2d view. You’ll quickly stop using the 3d view because of movement issues, you’ll think that you’re telling your units to move to one area, only to find you can’t click there or some other type of interface bullshit failure. So you switch to 2d view, which actually looks cool and works well, with minor “hey is that a spot I can move, click click click click, no, no i can’t move there? what the fuck? okay i guess i can’t move there”.

“10 Unique Factions.”

Doesn’t fucking matter! You can win with military only quickly and effectively every time, no diplomatic enemy will ever out diplomacy you. No AI will use magic to fend off your unit stack EVER. Factions = Fucked.

“In-Depth unit and character design.”

Character design that is unnecessary and clunky in implementation. Seriously you never need to design a custom unit ever.

“Tactical Battles.”

Fail! You only need to do one or two tac battles early on. once you get your unit stack up to 600+ attack you can beat anything without having to waste time in tac battles. There’s nothing of benefit in tac battles, zero.

“Rich, story-driven campaign developed by Random House’s Del Rey.”

AHAHAHAH this is a complete fucking joke. The campaign is boring and initially full of bugs. There is no sense of urgency in the campaign, so you can just sit back and build up your unit stack and once again steamroll through the fights with increasing boredom.

“Incredible replayability.”

No. Magic sucks, diplomacy is a jokeshop, RPG elements are meaningless, only military matters. There is so little to replay for it’s sad.

“Single player or Multiplayer (up to 16 players).”

Pretty sure multiplayer is still disabled/unimplemented I think. And if does work, who the fuck would want to try to play this busted ass unit stack vs. unit stack mess?

“Plays on very low end hardware.”

The maximum number of people can see how unbalanced and devoid of fun the game is.

“Takes advantage of the latest hardware.”

? To do what? What does it do on my new fast computer that is great? I had to turn of 3d map mode just to be able to see the map clearly and move my units around, the game forces you to play “low rez”, how is that taking advantage of the latest hardware?

“Massive modding support.”

Who cares about this now. I paid $50 for a fun, working game now.

“From the people who brought you Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire.”

I should have known Elemental was going to be all concept and zero delivery. I tried to play GC and couldn’t because it felt like shit. SoaSE, I tried to play the tutorial and got so fucking bored I quit. I’ve done that 3 times, what a bunch of fucking ass taco.

I stayed a while and did more then just listen, I played Diablo 3

I had about 3 hours hours of play with the Diablo 3 BlizzCon 2009 build. The play was mostly broken up into 15 minute session, with a couple 30 min runs. I played each of the four classes in a portion of act two. The characters were already lv’d to around lv10.

Here are my impressions:
– Holy fucking shit it’s great.
– Witch Doctor seems over powered with his summons able to take almost all mob agro, leaving him free to deal damage from a distance free from danger.
– I died the most playing the Monk. Correctly timing his skills in combos seemed critical. This is no doubt part of the new play style being drawn up for Diablo 3. Less mashing attach and one spell, more balanced timed attacks with multiple spells interwoven.
– Spell interrupts seem unpolished, casts don’t start sometimes if you are melee’ing.
– The physics on the dead monsters have weight and feel “right”, bodies fall down, and rag-doll nicely, not like some games which heavily abuse rag-doll.
– Skill customizing with ruins/stones might be the best idea ever. It was not enabled in the build i played, but from how I was using skills constantly, being able to change your skills with mods should help to keep the game fresh.
– Good depth to the scenery around the level. Sometimes the scenery gets in the way of the game field covering the lower part of the screen hiding items, monsters and quest objectives.
– Move speed seems okay for combat the is no run/walk.
– The wizard had some fucking awesome spells, the Mirror Image spell had this incredible effect of the wizard splitting in two, you could almost feel the pulling and splitting.
– Barbarian two handed weapons sucked. I did way more damage using two single handed weapons.
– Mana regen allowed constant skill usage, you really had to spam skills to zap mana.
– Wizard had the best flow of skills I think.
– Largest mobs are around 15-20 monsters.
– Monsters required different approaches to kill, you can just see how much balance the Diablo 3 is designing when you have to change how you fight every couple minutes.
– Screen scrolling dropped frames every once in a while, shuttering a little bit.
– There was a couple here with their 2 children, one like 1.5 years old the other kid must have been 5-6 months. The childern were completely ignored so that the parents could play Diablo 3. Kinda disturbing.
– There’d are some tween girls being interviewed about their wow habits.
– Social awkwardness was at max.

Virtual California Cocksucker

Rockstar “making it fun to kill cops since 2001” entertainment has set loose its new murder simulator Red Dead Redemption. RDR is fun to play, beautiful to look at and filled with all the annoying shit that plagues Rocktar open world games. I have RDR for the 360 and have played for about 10 hours.

Where RD Wins:

– Graphics. The fucking horses look great. The clothes the main character has look badass. The old west buildings / scenery look perfect. The cycle of day and night is well done and adds loads of atmosphere to the game. JUST FUCKING WAIT UNTIL IT RAINS ON YOU SOME NIGHT IN GAME!
– Sounds is fucking great. I’ve a 5 speaker setup and I just love hearing people shooting at me from behind, bullets whizzing past my head as I make my get away. Sometime you hear gun shots echoing off canyon walls, alerting you to trouble near by. JUST FUCKING WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR THE THUNDER IN THE EVENING WHEN IT RAINS IN GAME!
– The world feels very open and full of lasting consequences. No more shooting up the place and simply driving away to make a clean get away from the cops. In RDR you develop a bounty for all the “bad” shit do you, and that bounty doesn’t go away after you ditch the sheriff and his men, the bounty is on your head, growing ever larger in the event you commit more “bad” shit until you pay the bounty off with hard earned cash or get a pardon. What this does it make you less likely to just randomly shoot the place up when you are trying to progress through the game. It just adds a nice layer of consequence that is sorely missing from the GTA series.
– Multiplayer seems fun. I don’t fucking hate it. I’ve played maybe 4 hour of it. Most of that time was spent in “Open World Mode” which is just unstructured play time with the entire world map as the play ground. Players joining/leaving your game at random free to work together on “quests” to earn XP, or free to fucking open fire and grief like there’s no tomorrow. I prefer the shoot now, listen to players calling me asshole on live later option. I shall need more time with the Multiplayer once some of my real life friends pick up the game, it’s the only way I’ll play nice, playing with real life friends. The idea you can just ride around and shoot things together is a good idea.
– Shooting shit feels wonderful. Shoot some poor assfuck while he’s riding a horse, and the poor fuckass may blasted off his horse but get stuck in his saddle, causing a wonderful scene of man being dragged by horse. Aiming on the console controller is of course a challenge for an old school PC gaymer like me, but i just use the “casual” targeting mode which includes a snap to target feature that kicks in when you aim, which 90% locks onto the intended target. Bullet time! The game has Dead Eye bullet time, a feature you can activate to slow time down and line up 1 to N shots and then blast away hitting each target in real time. I always forget I have this option making for some failed combat encounters.

Where RDR falls flat:

– Fucking boring old west story so far, about 8 hours in maybe? While some of the dialog is interesting, and the character models are wonderfully detailed and well animated, it’s just average story telling. “Hey can you find this for me? Can you kill this person for me?” repeat, repeat, repeat. Ya we have some old west activities in there, herding cattle, roping wild horses, but the main portions of the story and just find this and kill this. What’s to be expected though here? Despite the “no new ground broken” nature of the quests, they don’t detract enough to be faulted.
– Might be getting old fast, the third time it rained on me at night the magic was already gone compared to the first time it happened.

Were RDR Loses:

– Fucking TERRIBLE minigames. I hate minigames, and I hate the minigames in RDR.
– Go in water, YOU FUCKING DIE! This only a problem when you are riding a horse top speed and fail to see a small river in front of you, before you can stop the horse or turn your end up the the water , “YOU FUCKING DEAD”.
– Launch time DLC failure. I bought the game from Amazon, it came with some code for Gold Guns, and for the last 5 days the code entry process in game has FAILED! Fucking Rockstar, er I mean Fucking Game Devs/Publishers that skimp on launch data server capacity/network infrastructure.
– No save anytime any where feature? This happens to me with all Rockstar games though, I play for 10 or so hour,s the missions get more complex and require too many start overs from some arbitrary save point because i didn’t drive/kill fast enough, I give the fuck up and say “FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU FOR NOT LETTING ME SAVE WHEN I FUCKING WANT TO SAVE”. It’s always some fucking timing mission mechanism that puts me over the edge and makes me quit. LET ME FUCKING GO AS SLOW AS I FUCKING WANT ASSHOLES!

(if/when RDR hits PC, a Deadwood mod will be a must)

Mass Effect 2 x360 quick PUNCH

(SPOILERS AHEAD YOU BASTARDS)

My initial impression of ME2 after 4 hours of play.

– Character import – AHHAHAHAH you die and they bring you back to life to justify taking your lv’s away. GAY. Why even let me import shit. I like playing the “same” character but it just feels very forced and uncreative.

– Freedom’s Progress – It’s the first non-tutorial location you go. It’s a Alien’s(the movie) rip off for music and visual feel, very borrowed. Feels good, but it’s a rip off non the less.

– Sound – The cut scene sound is WEAK. Something just not right about it, it does not feel EPIC. just watch some space scenes from the original star wars triligy to see what i’m talking about when you compare the two.

– Graphics in the space cut scenes – The scale of ships seems off, but this was a weakness carried over from the first mass effect, the sci-fi space visuals are just average in my opinion.

– Sci-Fi – Science failure, talk of wireless networks with firewalls etc that Edi hacks? super gay FAIL. Complete 20th century earth tech/terminology just to make it “easy” for the audience to understand, or maybe the writers are the uncreative and lazy.

– Sci-Fi – SUCCESS – the data logs.  listening to the stuff the writers came up with the flesh out the ME2 universe is a great touch. It’s not Dune level awesome, but it’s the best thing out there sci-fi rpg wise on the x360

– AH hits of hot lesbian sex – Choose a female character, chat up your female crew, insinuate same sex loving. Catholics beware, it’s WONDERFUL STUFF!