Champions Online just went free to play. Sure microtransactions, but as the best part of the game is creating characters and their nemesis (just like the pen and paper game) this shouldn’t be a problem. I’m going to jump in even with my extremely limited time for gayming these days.
Category: RPG
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
Cthulhu saves the world
Though few have time to play through Old Style jRPG’s that I know of (I’ve been working on Final Fantasy Tactics for my DS for almost a year now), I wanted to make note of Cthulhu Saves the World to call attention yet again why we should be glad the Lovecraftian Mythos is in the public domain. Yeah!
A place to look at pictures and read some more information along those lines.
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim announced, website, release date, Max Von Sydow, whatnotall
Gary Gygax Personal Collection on Ebay
Most of it is old stuff that sucks, but it would be sweet to own an unopened 1st Edition Gamma World or have a second copy of Snit’s Revenge (I got my on clearance at Kaybee Toys when I was 10 or so and it’s had a rough life). The whole collection is here.
Damn the Minecraft
I ‘played’ Dwarf Fortress an hour or so a day for about two weeks awhile back so when Minecraft started getting the buzz on, it was quite easy to say: “fool me once” and not try it. I bit the bullet over the weekend and picked up the Alpha version and now, predictably, it’s an obsession (at least for the next two weeks or so).
That said last night, I learned how to make stone picks, wandered away from my spawn point, got lost and had to dig into a mountain when night fell to avoid the rapening. I underestimated the speed with which digging can be accomplished with a pick and dug down down DOWN until I ran out of picks and couldn’t see anything and got lost. Of course I hadn’t found any coal at this point so no light, no pick, lost inside a mountain. I started digging up and it took me half an hour to get to the surface, only to find that it was night again. Waiting for daylight, I chopped down some trees and then wandered back down into the mountain hole I made to build it out a bit (I had no idea where my respawn area was). ten steps down and BAM blown to pieces by three giant green penises. How did they get in there? At least I found my spawn point again.
MauriceBastard and Higherheels take the zyel (normal level) diablo down quite boringly but with much cursing
Disgaea 4 sprite compare
Nippon Ichi has had a tough couple of years–and I daresay it’s from not focusing on what they do well, and what they do well is make Disgaea (and Phantom Brave), so they are staking everything on the new iteration of the game. Given that sometime a few years ago, some new consoles came out that allowed more colors and better graphics, NI has finally gotten around to redrawing their sprites a bit bigger than what we’ve seen on the PS2 or PS3 so far. Stuff looks great– a full compare here. I’m worried about this game– not because it won’t be good, but because it will finally push me over the edge to get a PS3 along with the worry that my non-gaming responsibilities have finally added up to the fact that I can no longer put the time in to actually enjoy a good old SRPG…
Dwarf Fortressing for Mac
If you’re suffering with no games on your Mac (something that has been an eternal problem), and want to try a pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre alpha of a game that is largely unplayable, Dwarf Fortress may be of interest. While in it’s unplayable state, the game is free, and it’s probably still better than the abortive Elemental War of Magic. This post is pretty much for Matt.
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.