Seven Masters Vs The Underworld reprint coming soon

Four Mountains Fist action will again be more possible for newb players

One of the best Shadowfist expansions is getting a reprint in the next few weeks!   No more begging off people on the streets for Shun Dai, Never Surrender or Kun Lun Clan Assault cards (a common no less!).  I’ll be picking up a box for sure to flesh out some of my missing rares and pumping up my uncommons.   If anyone is getting a box and wants to do some trading for the stuff they need, shoot me a message.  With deference to Netherworld 1, this expansion has both the best art and some of the best cards in the game, what’s more it has all but three of the cards for the Seven Masters faction, that is playable with a box and a half or so of this set.  A must have.

Facebook you actually have a use…

xenophile
Yay!

…other than monetizing our personal connections for the engrandizement of the ownership.  However that may be, noticed a post on the Cosmic Encounter facebook page about expansion 3!  No details at all, just essentially a confirmation that it’s in the works with the original designers and FF.    All I can say is: splendid.

RAGE – the awesome is everywhere

I spent four all too short hours with Rage in the last few nights and while the storyline feels like a minor sub-plot in Fallout so far, the environments are just amazing.  Nothing repeats, nothing is the same anywhere, every polygon surface you see is different from all the other polygon surfaces. There are no patterns.  It’s as if someone textured the entire world by hand (which it turns out they did).  The level of detail in these textures as well is astounding, even broken bits of concrete in a dark corner have gang iconography all over the place and is crazy with details.    The character models are really good, but stylized a bit (like Brink) giving them a bit of  a cartoonish look.   Everything looked so cool, I can’t help but continuously take screen caps, mostly of those that gots themselves shot.  An absolute visual feast.  I haven’t seen a ton of machinery yet, but from Doom 3, id has proven that their in-game machine creations are amazing. I’ve seen one so far, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The game play is good, weapons have a solid feel to them, and if you had any worry about the enemy AI after DOOM 3, don’t.  I’ve fought most of wasteland gangs and a few hundred mutants so far and the AI is real fun to fight against.  They duck, they call out orders to each other, they hide when they get shot, they run away and hide if they get scared and each gang has different tactics and specialties.  After only three hours or so, I’m still in the tutorial bits where they introduced the vehicles and racing.  Racing and vehicle fighting are loads of fun, it’s not the easiest on the keyboard as it feels (like any racing game) that an analog stick is ideal, but WASD works just fine.   My only complaint  about fighting in the wastes is that it’s a bit too easy because all your weapons home in on the targeted enemy as long as they are in your forward arc.  While this works in the Rage paradigm, if you’re looking for Twisted Metal, this is close but isn’t quite that.   What’s more, in races (not in the wasteland) if you get blown up you respawn. Again, this works as races are a side quest type thing, but it’s a little strange to see cars spawn into a post-apocalyptic race track (including yourself).

One warning though, both the bosses I’ve hit ran me completely out of ammo, so when you pick the game up make sure to buy TONS OF AMMO or you will end up doing the ASS PUNCHING method seen here.

Again, the story is nothing that great so far mostly because we’ve played through every possible post-apocalyptic plotline in Fallout 3, though things aren’t as bleak for the people in RAGE as the people in Fallout as they have TV’s and radios and cars and stuff, there is clean water all over.  Seems like the people would be fine if they weren’t trying to kill, torture and eat each other, but then they wouldn’t need you to go around shooting hundreds of people and things.   The way you get quests is pretty old school RPG, a lot like the Witcher and Fallout where an NPC is hanging out in an area and you talk to them and they give you stuff to do.  Unless you are in an inside area, you get pathing on your map to know where to go.  With this feature you can get to places extremely quickly, with no searching around at all.  There’s good and bad about this, but it seems to be the thing devs do since oblivion.  I’m playing Dark Souls at the same time and the contrast between the absolutely remorseless lack of information and the “your quest is here” of Rage (and Witcher, etc.) takes a bit of the fun of exploring.  What’s more, the devs don’t have to put stuff between you and the quest to waylay you because you’re going to get to the quests so quickly, it doesn’t matter that much what’s between.

I haven’t gotten into the Multiplayer yet, but hope to this weekend.  We all have some tough decisions to make with BF3 and Rage out within weeks of each other.  Being and id fanboy, I preordered Rage so took the pain of 60$ a month or so ago. Of course with the BF3 beta ending this weekend, and that’s another must have title.  This month hasn’t been wallet rape, it’s been wallet gang rape by the gaming industry and I’m left BEGGING FOR MORE.

There are some very bad people running around after the asteroid hit.
her sole purpose in the game is to teach you the wing stick...
big jumps are an essential part of the being filled with RAGE

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.

RAGE TONIGHT! Dark Soul’s tomorrow!

It begins.  The 2011 GOLDEN SHOWER OF GAMING HITS.  Midnight unlock of the RAGE on steam (we think), and tomorrow Dark Souls.   Dark Souls goes without saying will be painful and frustrating and amazing.   Rage is id’s first game for a long long time and I have high expectations.   I expect it also to be a ton tighter than the new Frostbite engine, which, while I am loving the BF3 beta, has some poignant issues with the stretchy necks and falling through the map.  MRAAAAAAK!

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.

Battlefield 3 beta, Origin and grenades

You are going to see this logo a lot in the next year or so.

Yesterday I cruised home over lunch to start the BF3 beta download, and for 3 gigs it went exceptionally fast.  80% by 2PM or so is no joke with that size download.   I wasn’t able to get in the game right away due to a driver update download (much slower from nvidia) and the CHILDRENS, but got in late at night for a span of time.  Suffice to say, this is really a must-have game for everyone that likes FPS, even if they play 10-20 hours with the singleplayer and dabble with the multi, it will be well worth it for the visuals alone, which are incredible.  EA knows everyone will want and buy this because, let’s just face it, it will be awesome incarnate. Like Blizzard with Starcraft/D3, and Stardock and every online publisher, EVERYONE wants to try to take a piece out of Steam. Since BF3 is going to be so awesome, EA wants to take a big piece out of Valve with it’s new Origin system.   You must have Origin installed and running to play BF3, even the single player, from what I understand. So EA is strong-arming people who want to play their awesome game to have their version of Steam installed.  Wouldn’t you?

Obviously, this has raised the same type of ire that D3’s “always online” with the master servers (like an MMO) issue that is causing lag in single player games in the beta (granted it’s still a beta).  What’s more, the older thingy EA did to try to mimic Steam really really sucked, so who can blame people that are gunshy after that crap was installed and polluted people’s systems?  However, just like D3, everyone will buy this game anyway despite complaints and suffer Origin’s existence.  Given that, after just a few hours last night, I think EA’s Origin is going to be a lot less obtrusive and annoying than Blizzard’s MMO style approach to Diablo 3– though Origin seems very strange at first because it is the game’s front end and it’s in a browser, I think  interface so far is top notch, everything is very cleanly laid out, it doesn’t seem to effect anything in game, chatting is very well implemented and overall stuff is very simple to find and use.  At first I was understandably annoyed, but after an hour or so with many crashes kicking me back to the interface, I started to think the Origin implementation is pretty neat.  If you are a hater without giving Origin a go, you know you cannot deny that BF3 is something you want and it makes total logical sense that EA would push it’s version of Steam off it’s super heavyweight title.  Just try it out. It’s not that bad.

Now onto the game:  BF3 crashed a lot.  I fell into the map twice and couldn’t get out until I hit a kill-brush.  There was horrible lag when I was near some other players, ending in my demise via the knife.  I couldn’t find a server that wasn’t full  for 5 minutes or so each time I tried to play.   I didn’t get on the map with the vehicles because they were all locked.  I couldn’t get in a game with any of my friends.   Lots of issues?  Yes.  Was it fantastic and would I face all of these issues to play more?  YES.    The feel of the game was great, grenade explosions are absolutely breathtaking (I threw one every time I respawned just to see it explode!), tracer rounds look gorgeous, the environmental damage effects are awesome, and you can go prone and, drum roll, you can get points for suppression fire!!!  Fire and movement tactics not only implemented in a game but rewarded. Finally.  Say you are a mid ranged, hang back and fire the LMG’s type of player– you may not kills that much but you are certainly helping your team by forcing the enemy to keep their heads down and restricting their movement.  Now you get POINTS for it.

As I mentioned above, I only got to play on the non-vehicle map in the park/subway and only for an hour or so, hence I can’t write that much about the game.  Despite no tanks and toys, it was absolutely engrossing– clearing halls and rooms with your squad via grenades, suppression and rush is what this is all about and BF3 does it well.  I’m itching to see what else the game has in store.

Also of note, on Origin Deluxe BF2142 is in the FREE GAMES section. Can’t argue with that!

Summer Reading – Cropper’s Cabin

Yes, I know summer is over, but I finished this bad boy just after the solstice so it counts dammit!  Jim Thompson– crime writer, very under-read, if not underrated.  I find while reading his stuff that I have many V-8 head slapping moments of “oh THAT’S where they got that from!”   El Rey from The Getaway is referenced in From Dusk Til Dawn, and the whole “son is the father of the man” thing in Blood Meridian is straight out of The Killer Inside Me (not that Thompson made that up himself).  I’d say No Country for Old Men is almost a homage piece to Thompson’s style.  Though there is no doubt in my mind that McCarthy is the better writer overall, a virtuoso with diverse novels like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses, but for crime novels, Thompson is the best I’ve read, blowing away even Hammett in terms of construction and language.  That said, Cropper’s Cabin is not Thompson’s best, but it is a great fast read delving into the psychology of a kid that is pushed to the absolute brink by those around him, and like a powder keg, the reader is just waiting and waiting for him to implode or explode.  I won’t spoil it, as it has a few twists and turns to get to the inevitable conclusion, but suffice to say it has a pace change in the middle and some horrific revelations.  What I dug most about it was the window into the cropper’s (and their Indian landowner’s) world and lifestyle as a backdrop for the events.  In some of the other crime novels by Thompson, the place and situation don’t matter all that much, but in Cropper’s Cabin, the cultural context is crucial to the story.  I’d put the book slightly above The Getaway due to that book’s almost tacked-on ending (the El Rey bits), but not quite as good as After Dark, My Sweet.  If you’re looking for an intro into Thompson’s work to see if you’ll dig his stuff, Cropper’s Cabin is a good one.  Unfortunately this was last published in ’92 as part of the Black Lizard line of crime stuff so might be tough to find– but with electronic books (bleh!) it’s instantly available.