kenjisan

So long, Maddy...

We had some good times.

Review: Halo 2 Campaign

Chris Freed and I took this game on Saturday afternoon (and on into the night), beating it in about 10 or 11 hours (give or take breaks for dinner/popcorn/Ho-Hos). My initial reaction is, "wow, that was short." After speaking with a number of people, I was assured that it was about as long as the first one was. Go figure.

This game sure is beautiful. On a number of separate occasions, I found myself standing on a ridge looking out across the Halo ring, or at the earth city across the river. Bungie spent a lot of time making this game look good and they don't disappoint. There were a few rendering glitches when we played through (detailed skins took a few seconds to load onto close ups of the models), but we figure that may be due to his dated Xbox (one of the first).

The story itself is good. It picks up immediately after the last one and goes into much greater detail about the motivation behind the Covenant and their obsession with the Halos. My main gripe here—shared by many, I understand—was the abruptness at the end. No spoilers, but you'll see what I mean.

As good as the game play experience was, I share Justin's opinion that Bungie may have spent more time on the multiplayer aspects of the game than the campaign. Maybe I was just spoiled by the first—best of its kind. Or maybe I'm used to playing 40+ hours of an RPG. Or maybe I've been playing World of Warcraft too much. I don't know. The campaign was good, I'm just glad I have the multiplayer game as well.

Follow-up: Halo 2 Online

Apparently I'm not the only one who shares my multiplayer, optimatch woes. There is a solution, although it's a little half-assed.

I'm still hoping for a patch though.

Review: Halo 2 Online

If we're talking about gameplay, Halo 2 does not disappoint. Not only is the game faster and more fluid than its predecessor, but Bungie's added more weapons, more well-designed levels (and some of the old), and the oft-talked about ability to dual wield.

If we're talking about stat-tracking, I've never seen an FPS more thorough than this one. You can log on to bungie.net and check your stats there, and we're not just talking about a simple kill-to-death ratio. No sir. Each game is logged, keeping track of all the stats you see at the end of the game (i.e. average life, best killing spree, hit %, head shots, most killed, most killed by, etc.—all in addition to kills and deaths). And even then, Bungie must have thought it wasn't enough. You can actually get a map of the level you played that tells you where the action happened for that game. It's nuts, man. Nuts.

If we're talking about the campaign mode, I can't really comment since I haven't played a minute of it. I'll have more to report back on later this weekend.

Finally, if we're talking about XBox Live convenience, we're talking about Halo's fatal flaw. Playing against friends in unranked games is easy. Really easy. Like any other Live game, you can invite friends to a "party," pick the game type, and go. If you have any desire to play against strangers, then get ready for a mountain of frustration. The only way to do this is through their "Optimatch." Optimatch pairs you up against others around your rank for a random type of game. One of the nice features of optimatch is that you join games with a party, rather than individually. That's about the only nice feature. Try as we might, we just couldn't figure out a way to actually choose the game type. The best we could do was pick "skirmish type games," which features anything from team CTF to team Conquest. All we wanted to play was some team slayer. Alas, of the slew of games we played through optimatch, only one was of the slayer type.

Maybe if we knew the maps and game types better, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but I just can't believe that Bungie neglected to provide such a basic option as picking the kind of game you'd like to play. It's almost as nuts as the extent of their stat tracking! Hopefully we'll see a patch to fix this problem. That, or we get better at these games, because a few of the matches last night were, well... what's the opposite of fun?

WoW Class Roles

The developers have decided to finally speak up about what the intended "class roles" are for each class in the game. Hopefully this'll help those of you who are still undecided.

WoW Beta Gameplay Discussion - Class Roles

Various WoW news

According to both Amazon.com and ebgames.com, World of Warcraft is scheduled to ship on November 15. I find this hard to believe based on the currect beta version (only half the classes have talents, the racial traits haven't seen much of a revision, and it's still incredibly buggy), but who knows, right?

If you're really nerdy, you can buy a special keyboard for your World of Warcraft adventures. Justin and I were thinking about raffling one, just so we have someone to make fun of.

Partying with people I actually know (Josh and Justin) has made me realize how much fun this game can potentially be when it comes out. I think it's time to start thinking about the all-important Guild name...

Fable made me do it

Yes, I did keep playing this game, even after poker. Shame on me? *Shrugs*

First impressions:
Wow. Yesterday, I ran around kicking chickens. This earned me the nickname "Chicken Chaser." I think that everyone starts with this name, but then again, everyone I know who's played it also was kicking chickens. I also learned to use magic, my bow, and my sword, humiliating that brat Whisper in front of her big brother. When I was released as a hero into the world (at a ceremony that I attended shirtless), I quickly starting doing good deeds in the name of myself.

I really haven't played it all that much—just a few hours—but it really does seem as open as they all said it was. In the world, you can do any number of things, but the great thing about it is that there are consequences to all of those things. Punch that stupid kid and the guards come after you. Rifle through your neighbors things and you could get busted.

More on this later.

When will my Mac officially scare me?

Not any time soon, as far as I can tell. Right now, there is no official Mac release date for Doom 3. As of mid-July, official word from id was "when it's done", although it appears that development has at least started on it.

The most recent news I could find comes from a report out of QuakeCon. Programmer Robert Duffy says:

both Linux and Max OS X versions of Doom III are moving in close development with the PC version and Hollenshead [CEO] said that they will have Mac and Linux files available for download when Doom III is released for the PC for people who run those operating systems . . .

According to EBGames, the XBox version of the game should ship on 10/4/04, but we all know how these dates tend to shift around.

New FAQ

Looks like a new patch is coming, and at last, hunters will be added. I think I'll at least try the hunter class out (me and most everyone else) because I like the idea of having guns as your primary weapon.

Touching on a few of the highlights of this next patch are:

• Gnomish and Goblin Engineering
  
• Added high level dungeons
  
• Rogue Talents
  
• Priest Talents
  
• Auction House Improvements

I still have no idea when the game will actually make a public release. Additionally, here's an updated FAQ on plans for the future.

A History of Warcraft

Blizzard has published a history of Warcraft, detailing the birth of the universe all the way up to the Frozen Throne. It's very comprehensive, but also fairly interesting, if you like that sort of thing.

Beta Patch 3 and PvP

Blizzard is moving into its third phase of beta testing, adding the much anticipated player vs. player aspects of the game in this revision. You can read about new additions here.

Sadly, Hunters haven't been added in this patch.

WoW: Newbie Impressions

I find myself playing WoW in a way different from any other video game. Normally, I enjoy a good story. I enjoy immersing myself in the carefully crafted dramatic arc, the rising action, the climax, the resolution (usually rendered in beautiful CG). MMORPGs do not have this. Sure, there's a story. From what I understand, WoW has a fairly good story, fleshed out, told in segments by different NPCs as you fulfill your various quests. But the reality of this format is that it never allows for a surpreme conflict between Good and Evil. There will be no Final Battle. There is no Final Boss.

And because of this reality, I play the game like it's a game, ever conscious of the next level, my amount of silver, my stats and my equipment. My immersion is different from the movie-theatre-like immersion of a Japanese RPG. In a more linear-based RPG, I am riveted by a crazy story that involves an evil queen trying to collapse time from her throne at the edge of the universe, my mouth salivating at the knowledge that before the credits roll, I'd be able to save all of existence from destruction. In an MMO, I get caught up in the expansiveness of the world, of trying to do well at my job (as healer), of trying to stay alive.

It's an interesting trade off. Before playing WoW, I'm not sure I would have said it was a good trade off. For now, I'll reserve my judgement and look forward to the next time I get to run through the world, hurling Holy Smites and Lesser Heals like a hack writer and his weather-based analogies.

WoW: Initial Impressions

Pat was right: an hour means nothing. I sat down to play for the first time last night at around 6:30 or 7, and before I knew it, it was 10. In fact, when I was told that it was 10, I didn't believe it and had to look for myself.

WoW does a very good job of making me feel like I'm playing a Warcraft game. Like all the other reviewers have said, it's like the RTS game, only zoomed in. The game runs fairly smoothly on medium settings on my 12' Powerbook, and if I punch it up to max, it only struggles in a few spots. I did encounter some lag from time to time (along with the other players in my area), although this is to be expected.

Character creation is very good—even in these early stages—reminding me of an EA sports game. I created three characters: Pachinko, a human paladin; Banock, an undead cleric; and Banana, a nightelf druid. I played as Banana for the majority of my time last night. I spent most of that time running quests for people: collection quests and delivery quests, for the most part. While there were a number of other players online, it never felt too crowded.

I think the most lasting impression I had was the expansiveness of the world. I never felt like I was being boxed in by artificial barriers. If I wanted to run off the path into that darkened wood, I could (although I did once and paid dearly for it). The areas transition smoothly into one another with no noticable loading time, giving the game a further sense of realism.

WoW: Pre-Impressions

Last night, I received an invitation to beta test Blizzards newest game, World of Warcraft. Many kudos to kwc for working his magic, once again.

At around 11:00, the downloading began. I tried to sleep, but ended up working on this web page more than getting rest. In any case, I slept in too long for it to be reasonable for me to play in the morning.

I'm going to try to record my reflections on the game here from a very newbie POV. This will be my first taste of an MMORPG (although I've played my fair share of the Japanese style RPGs). I know a little bit of what to expect from watching Pad, glynnenstein, and Din play FFXI, but really I don't have a whole lot to compare it with. I'm a virgin to this world, and I'll write about it with as much of that virginal purity as I can.