Yes it's legal, so here! (Diablo III First impressions from it's Beta)

Since the confidentiality clause of the Diablo III beta has been lifted, I decided to copy pasta my thoughts from the beta forums here.  Maybe later I will nab some screen grabs...  Maybe.  But now, enjoy some hot steaming copy pasta:

"Overall, it looks and feels great.  It "is" Diablo, which was something I was a little worried that it might not be when the first screenshots were released.  The overall feel is great, the gore is perfect (very great eew factor on some of the enemies presented), the transitions between dungeons, caves, and open areas are very nicely done.  


The level advancement is quick.  Very quick, in fact, compared with the amount of level progression shown to be available in the future late game to the speed at which one reaches lvl 13.  Just quick enough to feel a little too hasty.  That and if the beta is the entire first act, the game feels very compressed and constrained, almost to the point of lacking substance relative to previous Diablo games.


Diablo two took forever to finish each act, as they were broken into several sub acts which some areas took the better part of an afternoon to fully complete.  If this was the whole first act, it only took a couple of hours to finish solo, about 50min (or shorter) in co-op as everyone just races to the end goal of killing the skeleton king.  I know in previous Diablo's that would be a good part one of Act I, but if that is all of act one... I worry for the rest of the game.


 Now I realize this is the beta, and I'm really hopping that it's only the tippy tip of the iceberg, but if each act is relatively the same length, then it's going to be a rather quick and possibly short lived game.  I really hope my instincts are just wrong on this.  I would hate for this to be a 5-10hr casual game.  I long for the previous Diablo style of being a hard core 30-70hr plus game.  What I'm trying to say, is that I hope this game doesn't severally suffer from a lack of muchness.


Back to the good,  the use of particle effects and lighting are stunning throughout the whole game.  Everything is just wonderful (and some times disgustingly so) to look at.  Each class feels unique and has appropriate pros and cons.  Everything is mostly balanced and just needs minor tweaks here and there.  


One of the big things I enjoyed was the slew of abilities your given to choose from.  It's not a choice between what's most dps blah blah blah, it's more "what is the style that you enjoy".  THAT little extra bit of customization, to have 2 or 3 of the same class in a party and each one with different abilities, was nice.  And changing abilities was no hassle at all.  A small cool down, but it wasn't too penalizing, allowing you to swap for situations on the fly.


 Crafting is pretty straight forward and simple (it just needs to have more "class specific" items to fill in the giant level gaps.  Like first class equipment, such as ceremonial dagger/mojo/source/wand, are strange.  Some don't even start until lvl 16-20.  Starting one at  lvl 6 and you don't get any upgrade until lvl 24 seems a little excessive, leaving those players with little luck in finding rare items in the dust).  Good number of enemy types in this first section, I hope it keeps evolving along those lines throughout the game.


Absolutely love the use of physics engine.  Love how the levels crumble and explode all over, very well done.  I enjoyed the spoken lore as you kill each enemy type.  Hearing the various characters describe them in detail was very  nice (and done in a very delicious Eternal Darkness style, which horror-esque games lack these days, which is a damn shame).  Voice acting's good, ambiance is good, story is good so far, conveyance was clear and to the point, I do want to know what happens after the skelly-bones king.  Yeah, so far so good.


And as a final side note:  Getting a feel for the Monk class makes me very excited for the next wow expansion."


--N00basaurus

A Quick Thought on the Subject

I'm typing this from a moble device, so please bare with the auto-correct awkwardness.

More and more rumors and speculation are coming about from the next generation xbox, the so called "xbox 760", and one has me particularly unhappy.  It's the rumor of DRM.  Or digital rights management that might be built directly into the console. 

This has been a long time thing getting more and more out of controll, and no one has really done anything about it.  The theory is this: people buy game, people turn around after x time and sell/trade in game, digital rights companies gets no profit one that 2ndary trade in.  Most of the time the 2ndary trade is done at 1/2 of less orriginal price, but that's never brought up.

To "some" *cough* E.A. *cough* companies, turning in several games you no longer enjoy for a new one, is akin to piracy.  So they do junk like only allow you limited installs on P.C. games and junk like that.  And it really is junk.  It's harder to point at with p.c. games but now rumered for xbox, it lightened some complications.

(note: Blizzard's battle.net solution and steam are pretty damn swank in this topic, kudos to both and those like it).

The biggest of which is DRM sevearly limits the lifetime of a videogame by reducing it's shelf time.  This may not really be bad for a quick one-shot game, but there are quite a few games that pump out DLC.  Games like rockband, Call of honor battlefield, and x named dance games will have drops in dlc sales as players can no longer pick up dead shelfed used copies of the core game and purchase the subsiquint downloadable packs.

The technology (and profit grubbing butthurt compaies going QQ)is starting to lead to a greed run to a "rent to play" set up where no one really owns the game.  You have X-time to play where x is the number of days and you have to pay full price to play each time.  You might even have to pay to store your saved data, then pay more to retrieve it.  As some one who still owns a plays a fully working Dream Cast (and older systems), this scares me.  It really does.

I sort of understand the "why" but punishing your once dedicated customers is not the way to go.

-N00basaurus

Tick tock America, Tick tock.

Upcoming reviews

I have two reviews to write.  The 1st is of Skyrim.  The second is of  Starwars: The Old Republic.  Both are hard to write for reasons that are quite opposite each other.

The Skyrim review is a little difficult, as a sandbox game is always difficult.  The level of experiences quite out weigh the time I have to spend on it.  The Starwars MMO review is difficult because my critique of it is rather harsh.  Overall it seems to be getting good marks, but for me it lost it's grandeur.

I'm giving myself a little bit of time to write these out, but I wanted to poke my head on here to say this:

I was quite disappointed with Starwars: The Old Republic.  From my experience with the beta to release, my concerns were left unaddressed, which is a shame.  The story-lines were great.  The voice acting superb.  The writing, brilliant.  Though that's nothing new from bioware.  The problems I had were things beyond that.  The gameplay was..well...grinding.  The quests were still what you find in any MMO.  Beyond the story-lines and dialog, your not left with much.  Really, if you re-textured all the meshes, it could be any generic upstart MMO.  I felt disenfranchised about the whole thing.  Like they had an opportunity to do something really unique and special, and, well, didn't.

Take for instance, the race choices.  Hard core Starwars fans argued with me about this, but they can't see beyond the names and titles to see meshes and textures, skins and rigs.  But what it boiled down too, was that everybody playes the same mesh.  The texture may have different colors, like blue skin, or red skin.  It might have some additional mesh components, like tiny horns or sunglasses or a couple of tentacles, but in the end of the day EVERYBODY IS  HUMAN.  Which is funny that they give around 8 or more names for the same human mesh.  Blue human, Red human, Spikey nub headed human, tattoo and piercings human,  Sunglasses man (The sunglasses show that he's a robot!  Apparently Starwars has never herd of "Oakley"), blindfold man, tentacle head man, and that's pretty much your options.

 One of the saddest "race" options I found was cyborg.   When you think "Cyborg" you think some melting face terminator crap.  Asymmetrical menagerie of flesh and metal.  Pieces of skin missing, shiny areas poking through the holes, pipes, tubing, and a kitchen sink tap all hanging out in various unseemly places.  In Starwars: The Old Republic, "Cyborg" means wearing sunglasses and a double microphone blue-tooth headset (You know, cause 2 microphones are better than one with the cell reception the empire gets theses days).

  I felt a little betrayed by it all.  Half the fun of Starwars is all the interesting aliens running about.  Here, they chose the most boring ones, the easy "Same mesh, just throw on a bunch of re-textures and call it good" route, and it shows...badly.  Even worse, they give some classes different racial companions that are far superior in detail and have unique and interesting meshes as if to say "Ha! look what you get to run around with, and never customize or "be".  Hell, at least galaxies tried to make bothans a playable race.  (As a side note: If Starwars: The Old Republic makes that trandoshan model a playable race, I will eat my words, and buy at least a month of subscription).

As for Skyrim: Fluttershy says "FUS RO DAH!"

Fuck'n Aye

You know, in a usual congressional season, I wouldn't even bat an eye at this type of unreasonable legislature.  But here in the U.S.A. some crazy bills have been passed recently, and the fact that this is getting no press coverage what so ever, scares me.  The crazy thing is, it "could" pass.  Not due to some "moral high-ground" but because of the HUGE amount of cash that's being pumped into it by Hollywood and affiliates.  Which is kind of ironic in a way.  That is, if this sort of thing (internet and this crap bill) was around when Hollywood got it's start in the 1900's, I doubt Hollywood could have survived Britain and other countries black-listing all their movies, and studios like W.B. would be cannibalize by other studios as they try to beat each other to block and black list themselves and struggling start ups.



So yeah.  total B.S. congress.Total B.S.

Sandvich hungers FOR BLOOD!

I'd like to start by saying: I'm not big on the first person shooter.  That is to say, I don't pick up a game to play solely because it's a first person game.  There's many reasons that go into my choices, but the genera isn't the only bet.  That's mainly why I don't pick up Medal of Call of Military blah blah blah title games.  That and military sims are not my favorite games (I need more....surrealistic game play to keep me entertained).  Multiplayer is fun, it's true, but I feel like games that support only multiplayer are sort of scamming gamers into buying less content for the same price as full fledged single player story lines.  Paying full price for a 5map multi-player game without story or anything substantial just doesn't add up to 70+ hours of involved lore and problem solving.  If these games had both, awesome, great game, but often times, they just simply...don't.  It's also a possible explanation on how they keep putting out new versions every handful of months to make you pay full price AGAIN for a couple new maps, which could easily be dlc updates.  It's an infection of "the bottom line syndrome  that all of the entire entertainment field is stuck in at the moment. If it doesn't make money, it doesn't fly, which is a shame as that way of publishing/producing closes the doors on a lot of innovation and fresh life the whole, not just gaming, entertainment industry desperately needs (again).

So, now that that is over with, here is where I eat my words.

Game: Team Fortress 2
Platform: PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Mac
Developer: Valve Corp
Rating: 8 KABOOM! 

This is a game that I have been putting off playing for a very long time.  I've owned it in a package deal with Portal 1 and Half-life 2 with the Orange box, but after playing 1 map, having no tutorial, being confused, and dying in B.S. ways from spawn-campers, I put it down and never picked it up again.  That  is, not until they made it free to play via steam.  Now, I plug in every so often, wreak a little havoc for 15-30 min and then I'm spent until next time.

"Push the bomb" is a very common objective.

Team Fortress 2 is, for all sense and purposes, a First Person Shooter based on sort of a 1960's understanding of War fare.  You have various special forces that are all caricatures of said employments (I.E. the spy is french, explosives are Scottish, heavy weapons is Russian, engineer is American Mid-west/south, scout is New York, and you get the idea).  You have various simple objectives such as capture this, stand here, stand there, take object A move it to point B, guard this, destroy that, push, pull, jump, hop, skip, breath, eat, sleep, game.  Each class has "jobs" to do that are worked into their play style.  For instance, the spy destroys electronics, the pyro can find invisible spy's with fire, the scout is fast, the heavy lays waste but is very slow, medic....is medic, that sort of deal.  The steam version has a tutorial, all is right with the world.

Sandvich?

The thing that pulls me in and keeps me playing is the fact that there is a sort of A.I. in your character that is independent from you.  Your person's A.I.'s job..........is witty banter.  Your character spouts off things according to your situation to other characters.  Their A.I.'s then respond to yours in THEIR situation and it's absolutely hilarious.  The story I like to tell, is when I was a heavy.  Heavy weapon's guy has 3 weapons.  Big gun (Natasha), little gun, and fists.  You can have an option not to have little gun, and instead you have a health item named "Sandvich".  It is just what it sounds like, a sandwich.  Lettice, cheese, ham, bread, toothpick, olive, sandwich.  The medic's super power is that he can make himself and another invulnerable for a short time.  The classic combo is medic follows heavy and turns heavy invulnerable when surrounded by squishy enemies to kill.  So me (heavy) and medic are running down a hallway and we get into enemy base.  He pops invulnerability on me, and I, in turn, pull out sandvich and start having lunch in the enemy base.  Heavy starts eating (omm nom nom), medic player starts screaming and raging on the microphone, and enemy players are unloading clip after bullet clip into my invulnerable face trying in vein to kill me. And then it happens.  I nearly died of laughter.  My heavy starts yelling and taunting the other team "Me and Sandvich is coming for you!  SANDVICH THIRSTS FOR BLOOD!" and somebody's scout yells "No, NO! Anything but SANDVICH! AAAAAH!"  I lost it.  I couldn't continue playing I laughed so hard.  Me and medic both died there.  Medic rage quit out of the server, also funny, but wow, so funny.

Yup, Team Fortress 2, if your wondering why everyone dresses up in real life to cosplay as the players in it, download steam, play for free, it's pretty sweet.

Rating: 8 KABOOOOOM! 

Incoming Game!

It has been a short while since my last post, so time to blow the dust off the internet and get down to business! BOOSH!

Pew Pew Pew

Ok, first up is an interesting game that has a little bit of a back story.  It starts with a little release back in 2002 of one of my favorite games of all time, REZ.  It was for Dreamcast (another reason I feel that the Dreamcast was probably one of the best consoles ever made for it's time) and the Playstation 2.  It was visually stunning, not for the epileptic, had thumping rave music mixed by several pretty bad ass DJ's, level progression was sweet, it was just all around a good game.  It only had one real minor problem, it was a little short for my tastes.  One or two more levels would have done me just fine.  The game wasn't widely released, it was mostly pumped out in Japan and only pushed out here in the states in spots.  It wasn't until about 2008 or so that it was put out on the Xbox 360 arcade with an HD version.  The plot was simple.  Your trapped/lost in the 1980s style internet (think of the movie "Hackers" meets the movie "Tron"), and it's trying to kill you.  So...GTFO.  That's basically it.  The boss battles were nicely staged and gimmicky, the levels were long, hidden levels were fun, just everything was awesome.  Even better, it was a sort of rhythm game that played according to how well you do.  And the game punishes you for doing better by increasing the difficulty.  Overall, lots of fun.  (As a fun gaming history side note, there was a time in Japan (only) where if you bought the PS2 version of REZ, you could also buy something called a "Trance Vibrator".  It was a little plastic USB rumble pack that would buzz and vibrate with the music of Rez.  It's suposed to help you feel the rhythm...but there's other uses that it was being put to as well.  So yeah, there's that.)

Ok, that's the back story.

Now for the Review (cue lightning and dramatic background music)!

GAME: Child of Eden
DEVELOPER: Q Entertainment
CONSOLE: Xbox 360, Playstation 3
RATING: 7 Tainted with Internets

The colors, man, the colors!

De-worming space, shooting one box at a time.

Visually, wow.  Just wow.  Lights, color, sound, everywhere.  Everything interacts.  The background, the foreground, from the cursor right in your face to the little floating gears and particles in the far distance.  Everything you do, save for moving the reticle about, has noise attached to it.  Shooting, hitting, targeting, locking, tracing, switching outputs, everything.  There's bright lights, dark darks, it's quite a lot to take in.  It takes a few play throughs to really figure out what to do and where to go.  Like the previous game Rez, it's still a rail shooter, but it's not as "rigid" as Rez was.  There was a good 110 degree arc in Rez that your camera could swivel in.  Not too far to any edge of the screen, so they locked your head in place saying "here is where you are going, here's where you will shoot stuff".  In Eden, it's a little more like a 180 degree.  The constant worry of "missing something behind me" always seems to creep up, not knowing if something I can't see will shoot me.

Even Moby Dick is digital these days.

Music is the driving force of both of these games.  And sadly for Eden, it's the one part that I have a little bit of an issue with.  In Rez, there was a small swath of D.J.'s that lent a hand to the development.  Each D.J. had a level that personified their music, accenting them in fitting imagery and progression, ending with a remix of the level BGM in a boss fight.  It was seamlessly done, sounded wonderful, and looked good.  For Eden, they use only the music of one composing group Genki Rockets, which is fine.  My problem lies in the fact that there is no real differentiation between the levels such of the likes of Rez.  All the levels sound pretty much the same.  It's a little "poppy" and grinds on you a little near the end.  Then again, I used to be a raver way back when I was in High-school.  If the bass doesn't rattle the sheet-rock, your not playing it loud enough.  Where Rez came with some heavy onts onts onts, Child of Eden was more...party soft.  A sort of "rounded edges" feel to the music selection.  I understand that they would sort of want this to display the evolution of how the internet used to be, and how the internet is "now" as a more sophisticated entity instead of fat middle-age guys in light up 80's tron pajamas, but they really should have used several composers along with Genki Rockets to greater diversify the level areas and give each sector it's own unique feel.  It's own stand alone groove to shoot computer viruses with.

What rail shooter is complete without a cylinder hallway?

Overall, however, the game is still well worth playing.  It's a visual experience that I feel really needs to be "experienced".  If for anything, they did a really good job matching what music they did have with the world they made around it and how the player interacts with it.  Some minor issues, the Kinect is a little slow to react and too particular with placement when playing such a high paced game.  Most of the game is played with your hand in front of you, which the Kinect can some times confuse with you not having hands.  Just minor Kinect issues that are more issues to deal with the hardware than the software.  So yeah, If you get a chance to pick up a copy, go for it.  It's a bit of a trip, but a trip well worth it.

Happy Surfing.

RATING: 7 Tainted with Internets