Dark Souls on Steam… August

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…

 

Diablo 3 is lag incarnate and altogether pretty boring

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:

...fuck all this shit.

an intro to space piss!

1979.  I’d already been exposed to the cultural virus that is Star Wars and had seen Battle of the Planets and Starship Yamato and Far Out Space Nuts– but nothing could prepare a young person of the 70’s for the dribble if urine from the void that is JASON OF STAR COMMAND.  Part of the financial drive to make kids shows with real people rather than the far to expensive cartoons of earlier decades (ala Kroft Supershow and it’s ilk), JASON OF STAR COMMAND starts with the worst robot you’ve ever seen before and then digresses into a rather complex plot about body doubles and for an 8 year old,  abject confusion.  Since this was a plotline that should have NOT been attempted before any character development had taken place so we (the 8 year old audience) could actually tell the evil doubles before the characters in the show could rather than just wondering what the heck is going on and hoping some stuff blows up (like the Wiki robot or, best yet, the clothes off Susan O’Hanlon).

Well, this fucking show is on Netflix now and if I could I would force you to watch it to share that little piece of my childhood that died drowning in astral urine and to know for certain when I talk about failed MOO clones or the people complaining about the Mass Effect ending and deem them all sorts of sprays of SPACE PISS, I’m channeling JASON OF STAR COMMAND into your open mouth.

And speaking of the 70’s, look at this holy shit piece of plastic for the rich kids:

the lazervette courtesy of plaidstallions.com

Torchlight 2 beta video action mraak

Watch me die THRICE, see the explosions, see the no lag, see the ability to add skill points, see the ability to dodge enemy attacks!

Dare I say it: Torchlight 2 beta > Diablo 3 beta.  This is not to say that these are not great games– they are both amazing, but judging from the beta, TL2 was just a better experience.   Here’s why:

1) It’s a better game.  It’s more fun to play, especially if you’ve played a lot of Diablo 2.

2) It’s more respectful of your time.  There’s very little B.S. story stuff.  It gets right to the kill, loot, item manage, kill cycle that is the core of the game.

3) No lag for no good reason -sure other players will lag but that’s a normal reason for lag.  If you’re playing against someone in the BFE of the internet, BFE lag is what you’re going to get. What you won’t get is client side prediction coupled with an overburdened server.

4) Hit lag – when a monster attacks and you are nowhere near that monster you do not get hit.  In Diablo, the client side prediction means you will get hit anyway. This takes a huge amount of the tactical play from the game.

5) You can play at the highest difficulty right out of the gate without slogging through the game.  This is the main reason why the TL2 beta is better.

This isn’t to compare the final versions of each game–I haven’t played either. Diablo 3 was a beta I felt I +had+ to play, but TL2 I cannot WAIT to play every time I get the chance to.

As I’ve said before, Diablo 3 will be great to run through once on normal and dabble in Nightmare a bit, probably a full month of play and you will get your money out of it.  For the long haul, the game you will be playing in a year is going to be Torchlight 2.

Torchlight 2 beta

YEAAAAHHHHHHHH.  Got in an hour or so on Elite Hardcore as the Engineer with a couple random guys and died at level 7 in a huge mosh of undead.  Great stuff– and I am pleased to report that even in multiplayer games YOU CAN DODGE ENEMY ATTACKS.   For gaming value, even from what little I’ve seen so far, TL2 is pure gold  20$ for this? It’s crazy.

Well it’s about goddamn time!

Endless Space.   Community Driven 4x space game by some French peoples.  When you play, in the distance you can hear the cowes lowing out MOO.  Shot out onto the internets via Steam in alpha format if you pre-order the game, and while it is definitely an ALPHA, the game and interface shows a great deal of promise for those of use that feel we have been urinated upon from a great height by games like Sword of the Stars and Galactic Civ.

High points:

Combat is tight as Seven of Nine’s uniform and will work for both single player AND multiplayer

The interface is Jeisa Chiminazzo.  Extremely impressive both functionally and visually.

Ship design is easy.

BauriceMastard did a video of some play where he and I were babbling about it and of course it’s worth a listen– all fourty three minutes and twenty six seconds of it.

Netrunner’s back in action

now that's some tight box art

With the Magic: the Gathering resurgence, you’d think some of the others would rear their heads as well to get some attention and here we are with a big one: Netrunner.

While a great game from back in the day it was too was fun to play with just a starter deck– so fun that no one bought any more cards and the game didn’t have a long lifespan, or any lifespan I can remember.  There were towers of Netrunner cards along with the MTG land cards at Gencon one year, and that was sad because there’s nothing like Land in the netrunner card sheets.  Announced today, Fantasy Flight has gone ahead and removed the CCG part of the equation with the new edition, in the Living Card game format, branded to their “Android” universe.  Looks like a must buy if you like that genre– I for one loved the old Netrunner, but never got in more than 20-30 games, which was still at great deal for an 8$ starter deck.

 

The countdown begins for D3

Diablo 3 is just shy of a week away from release.  Following this game for so long, many of us have seen from the periphery a lot of the design paths that didn’t make it into the game (especially Maurice!Bastard who played a demo at some Warcraft tournament eons ago and actually read the website from time to time).  Here’s a list and why I think each change was made.  There is probably an exhaustive list of this somewhere.

Health Potions in addition to the health globes:  Originally there were no health potions, just the health drops in the form of the big red globes.  Now there are health potions and globes.  Why: I think they just couldn’t work this one out with the testers and the game became too dangerous without the player’s ability to heal whenever they wanted.  During the beta, any time I died it was because I was trapped by one mob and being shot at by another.  I don’t think this matters, but we may see the health globes disappear in the final…

No basic weapon attacks:  This one is really odd. You always attack using your skills, rarely the weapon you have. If you equip a bow and are not a character that has archer skills, you will never see an arrow fly from your hands.  Yet the weapon will add to your DPS and any other effects.  It’s very strange.  Why: this has got to be the real money auction house.  There’s no other explaination possible.  Blizzard wants users to be able to use (and that means buy from them or other users where they get a cut) as many weapons in the game as possible so where it seems like there was a constraint on weapons for characters to make them unique, this is gone.

No weapon animation for skills:  This ties into he point above and the monk is the most noticeable character for this.  When you have a weapon and your character uses a skill (such as any attack) the weapon disappears.  If you are carrying a bow and you want to punch someone as the monk, the bow disappears until the skill animation is over.  Why:  Again, this looks like the real money auction house.  They want all characters to buy all items in the game and since characters can use any weapon (but only attack with skills), they would have to animate all skills with all weapons for all characters.  That’s easily done if you started designing the character animation that way like pretty much all the other ARPG’s I’ve played– but if you have to go back and redo all the animation after someone said “hey we need a revenue stream here with the weapons” it will take forever and a day.

Character animations aren’t that great  compared to the monsters:   This is one that has not changed and probably should have. The monsters look incredible– just awesome incarnate.  The characters are sadly, just OK– nothing really special at all and their run animations are bit loopy across the board.  The worst is the witchdoctor (male version) with his shaking palsy and hunch–quite inspiring to make one select him right?  Why? locked in because of Armor sets.  Totally constrained changing or iterating over the character models at some point during development (far too early from the looks of it).

Characters are the same but you can tell they were originally designed to be different: Baurice!mastard complains about this one quite a bit.  The characters are all either close or long range DPS generators and though they look different and have some different types of mana, they are essentially the same across the board.  Why?  It’s suspected that they were trying to balance out the PVP and wow who gives a shit about that at all?  I would say the only character that feels different is the Witch Doctor.  If you play the Demon Hunter or the Wizard it really does feel like the same character with different animations for stuff.

After the beta, I’m really on the fence with D3.  I played D1 for about a month and then picked it up a couple years later because of various LAN’s that destroyed my dwellings from time to time.  I played D2 again for about a month and then picked it back up because of the ZYEL mod and well, yes, played a shitload over the years.  Instead of being more like ZYEL with it’s insane monster rushes and mentally unstable level of crafting options, D3 is looking to be another play for a month, play it a bit with friends here and there after but with Torchlight 2 swinging out soon after, it may be completely eclipsed.  That said, the D3 gameplay is jewel-like in it’s polish and very very fun.  If they had abandoned any ideas around monetizing in game items would it be a better game?  Signs point to Yes.