ME3: Reckoning! Yaaay!

Fun! Mass Effect 3 featured some promotional armor inspired by Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning, which looked like this:

The whole thing also worked the other way 'round, so Amalur featured some fancy ME3 armor and Omniblade daggers:

And since the only thing that's better than Reckoning is Even More Reckoning, Bioware have released their brand new (and last *sniffles*) ME3 multiplayer DLC, titled 'Reckoning'. Which has nothing to do with that other Reckoning, but I still like to point out just how much Reckoning there is in ME3. Ahem... moving on.

The new DLC introduces a whole lot of fun new toys to the game. There is fun new gear such as the Batarian Gauntlet, which grants your character the 'Falcon Punch', aka the Batarian heavy melee attack, which one-shots mooks and generally hurts like fuck. Hysterically funny when used with a Volus. Another cool gadget is the Geth Scanner, which highlights baddies through obstacles and walls. Use that thing with armor piercing mods or a Typhoon and you can lay waste to whole spawns of baddies before anyone else on the team can even see them.

The new weapons raise the already silly amount of guns in ME3 even higher, without adding any absolute must-haves. They all get the weird Bioware-style 'balancing' applied to them, as well. For instance, the 'Silencer' pistol is an upgraded Carnifex, which can be fired as quickly as you can work that mouse button (bug or feature?) and deals tremendous headshot damage (2 hits kill a Geth Pyro on bronze), but the size and amount of clips you get with the pistol force you to get married to an N7 Demolisher or an ammo box. The Geth Spitfire minigun has a ridiculously large clip, insane rate of fire and decent DPS, whilst sporting an accuracy rating, which is so low, it makes any shotgun feel like a sniper rifle in comparison. And since it's so heavy, it comes with a movement speed penalty. Ew! Most of these new weapons are fun, they're all pretty powerful, but they're not powerful enough to make you throw away your Hurricanes, Talons and Harriers.

The real stars of Reckoning are the new kits - brand new characters with awesome new abilities:


Awakened Collector Adept

He's one ugly fucker! And that's about all I can tell you about this guy from personal experience, as I'm really not into Adepts. The community's first impression is that he's a high risk vs high reward toon, who is very squishy, but also dishes out tremendous damage. Don't let the high base shield rating fool you, as his 'awakened' state drops them down to a much lower level. His biotic explosions are ludicrously powerful and (literally!) melt whole groups of baddies into green goo. He's also handy with Prothean and Collector weapons, which makes boring ass guns like the Collector Rifle almost feel a bit useful.

Geth Juggernaut Soldier

A playable Geth Prime, highly enjoyable in his best, insanely frustrating during his worst moments. To me, this is easily the most awkward kit in the entire game. This guy gets the most insane health and shield ratings and can be specced for added shield regeneration and 40% damage resistance. He's immune to Sync-Kills (the insta-kills we've all suffered from Banshees, Phantoms and the like), his passives grant him extra weapon damage, stability and ammo and he gets to plant a shield, which blocks friendly and enemy projectiles alike, on top of a heavy duty turret. Sounds too OP to be true, right? Well... the guy can't sprint (!), he can't take cover and he's as tall as your average lighthouse. And did I mention HE CANNOT FUCKING SPRINT?! How's that for balance?
Now, if you play mostly bronze and silver and you're not a complete moron, you won't die with this kit, even if you try. You can casually stroll towards an Atlas and its minions, shrug off all incoming missiles and drain that sucker's shields to replenish your own by utilizing your heavy melee attack. And with the 30% extra ammo, even the Harrier becomes a valid option. Fun? Fuck, yes! Challenge? Not so much.

Problem is, once you play gold or platinum, all that awesome survivability will do nothing for you. A Scion doesn't give a shit about your 5k shield rating and with the Juggernaut's inability to run and hide, well... there's just no happy ending here. But let's say you're a really great player, you can somehow 'make it work' and all that. Try playing alongside a Kroguard, a Havoc or any mobile character, who zips across the map at insane speed, soloing entire spawns while you casually walk everywhere. You're not just unable to sprint - you get a fucking movement speed penalty for being so big and fat! This guy isn't just a sitting, if somewhat impenetrable, duck - he won't top the scoreboards. Ever.

Talon Mercenary Engineer

Hey! Isn't that Zaeed but with a mask?
This guy is a pretty cool new build and very cheap and easy to power up, as he doesn't require any ultra-rares to max out his damage. And that's because his melee attack has been replaced with the Omni-Bow. Instead of punching baddies in the face, the Talon Mercenary shoots arrows, the amount and flavour of which can be altered through skills. Not only do quadruple armor-piercing arrows hurt like fuck on any difficulty, but since shooting the bow works like using powers, you don't even have to aim. So if you're a lousy shot, this character is for you. His special arrows have no cooldown and consume "grenades" on use, though you can spec this kit into regenerating arrows without having to visit ammo boxes all the time. The Cain Trip Mines are another nice touch, which deal damage similar to the Volus Recon Mine's.
Since Omni-Bow attacks count as melee, omni blade attachments and hydraulic joints will boost their damage even further. So, Reegar Carbine for bosses and arrows for everything else sound like the best option here. Alas, not all is perfect in Mercenary Land: This kit comes with the usual human engineer squishiness and two glitches. This character's points don't add up correctly upon level ups, meaning you don't get as many skill points as you should. Also, he doesn't know how to grab - the icon comes up, but instead of finishing off his victims, the Talon Mercenary just shoots an arrow at them. Maybe they'll change the animation to make him shoot for their knees.

Krogan Warlord Sentinel

This adorable little fellow is like Marmite. You'll love or hate him, but there really isn't much in between these two extremes. What's to love? Well, not only is he the heaviest, most awesome-looking Krogan in the game, but he sports life-regeneration, tech armor (aka massive damage reduction) and a massive hammer (!), which onehits a bronze Scion when using the right spec and gear. I shit you not, you can just walk up to one of those clowns, whip out that hammer and smash them to pulp like they're some random mooks!
So why would you hate him? Because he's a one trick pony. Sure, you'll pack a shotgun for its 50% melee attachment, but you won't ever fire it, because your hammer is simply that much stronger. And it comes with one attack animation. That's it. You run up to a guy, you squish him, you run to the next guy, rinse, repeat. Imagine somebody telling you the exact same joke over and over again. You may be the kind of guy who cracks up at the punchline every single time, but chances are, you'll get bored after a while, because once you've seen the hammer, you've seen it all. The guy looks awesome, he's incredibly powerful and requires very little skill to play, but if your definition of fun goes beyond "walk up to guy, pound with hammer", then this isn't the kit for you. He's also too massive to take cover, but why the fuck would he even want to?

Alliance Infiltrator Unit

I know, I know, a shameless EDI copy-paste. The community refers to her as 'The Sexbot', and I guess she is a smexed up version of that robot from Metropolis. She's also another incredibly strong Infiltrator kit, which is built around shotguns, of all things. I know what you're thinking, massive bonus damage for breaking from stealth, plus another 25% shotgun damage, ultimate Reegar face-meltage. It's not as "OP" as some make it out to be. First of all, any infiltrator can pack a shotgun and benefit from stealth damage, the Sexbot only gets the added 25%. Granted, that's still a pretty hefty amount, but it's not any more "overpowered" or "game breaking" than any regular infiltrator packing a Javelin.
Snap Freeze is a no-brainer with shotgun builds, the only new thing here is 'Repair Matrix'. It uses a grenade charge and regenerates your shields for 14-22ish seconds, fast enough for you to just waltz into any bronze spawn to gun them down without having to worry about evading any damage. At all. Naturally, this won't work quite so easily on any higher difficulty settings, but it doesn't have to: If you kick the bucket with Repair Matrix active, you will auto-revive, consuming no medigel or health packs. Which, of course, caused another uproar among the community. It's a cool, rather powerful ability, but you will still die if you're out of grenade charges or you simply fail to activate the power before you go down. Considering how many other classes can now recharge their shields at will and with very little to no cooldown, Repair Matrix is strong, but by no means game-breaking.

Cabal Vanguard

Okay, bad news first: Lady Turians are nothing fap-worthy. I'm not saying I couldn't, but I'd find it difficult. It's still great to have 'em! This has always bothered me about Mass Effect: You see Turians everywhere, all the time, they're ever-present throughout the trilogy and they're rather popular, as well (thanks, Garrus!). Yet all you ever see is Turian boys. Why? There's a female Salarian on the council, you bump into Krogan females, but Mr. Vakarian needs instructional videos on how to shag human and Quarian chicks, because his own species was all out of girls? Come on! Aaaanyhow...

Originally introduced as the much cooler-sounding 'Raptor', the now renamed Cabal sports the great resilience, precision and weapon damage you know and love from all Turians. Up to 37.5% passive bonus damage and 50% stability for weapons, 30% bonus headshot damage, you get the idea. As with all Turians, you also get the option to neglegt the health and shield buffs in favour of stronger melee attacks. What's new with the Cabal is the poison damage, which adds 30% of your base melee damage to every melee attack as a DoT. No matter how you spec this toon, this feature will make all your melee attacks more powerful and a bit more fun than those of any other Turian class. Is it a huge advantage or even a game-changer? Of course not. But the next time you punch a baddie in the face and leave him with one leftover stick of health, you won't have to come back for him, because the poison will finish him off. Another nifty feature is the heavy melee teleport, which will transport the cabal near potential victims to tear them apart before they have a chance to fight back. That is, when it doesn't glitch out and teleports you god knows where.

Instead of a Biotic Charge, this kit gets the rather broken and unimpressive 'Poison Strike'. Depending on how you spec it, this ability will teleport you a certain distance into the direction you're currently facing and any baddie you come across will get poisoned. This power is problematic for many reasons. First of all, you don't aim and charge directly at an enemy like other biotics do. You teleport past or through them, making it more difficult to use this power efficiently. And while a biotic charge deals decent direct damage, the damage from Poison Strike is dealt over time, meaning it'll take longer to kill enemies. Players also report that this ability will often fail to trigger at all, making it little more than just a teleport button. Furthermore, biotic explosions rarely trigger at all with this power and using anything but the lightest weapons will raise the cooldown on Poison Strike to a level where it simply takes too long to reuse to be effective. This ability is likely not working as intended right now and you'd be ill-advised to spec into it for now.

'Nightshade Blades' is significantly more powerful, although it still has its flaws. Basically, this ability allows you to fire a set of blades at an enemy, which deals massive instant damage, as well as added damage over time. Depending on how you spec, the blades will explode for AoE damage or cause even greater damage on impact. Both the animation and description suggest that you're shooting the blades at a single target, but as you can see on the video at the end of this blog, the blades seem to hit every enemy near the Cabal, resulting in massive AoE damage and entire groups of mooks biting the dust in seconds. The downside is that some enemies, such as Praetorians, don't seem to be affected by this ability at all. Bug? Working as intended? Better keep an eye on those hotfixes. Nightshade Blades uses grenade charges, so it comes with no cooldown, but has a very limited amoumt of shots.

'Biotic Focus' is your typical biotic melee buff, which raises movement speed, melee damage and damage resistance. Depending on your spec, this ability can instantly restore 40% of your shields upon use, which is incredibly useful with lighter weapons, resulting in a cooldown of 3-5 seconds. While this power does not overcharge shields like stimpacks would, it does not depend on grenade charges and can be used repeatedly with no need to visit the ammo box. While this power isn't strong enough to let you bitch-slap platinum spawns without ever seeking cover, it provides insane amounts of survivability and makes the Cabal a valid option for any difficulty. I smell a nerf incoming.

In its current state, the Cabal is not the mega tough melee powerhouse some might expect her to be when looking at her power set. Some abilities seem glitched (for now), the survivability to punch a Banshee in the face is simply not there and packing a heavy shotgun for the melee omni blade attachment raises power cooldowns too much to make them useful. Still, even without melee attachments and gear bonuses, her venomous claws are deadly enough to take down troopers on any difficulty and her high rate of mobility (teleport-dodge, heavy melee teleport) encourage you to use melee frequently.
For larger spawns, far away enemies and boss baddies, you'll want to bring a decent gun. You're not going to win any punchouts against a Brute, so it's a good idea to buff shields rather than melee DPS, shoot the big guy from a safe distance and punch his minions, instead. It's still a very fun play style and it also looks incredibly cool.

I've done a bronze test solo to see how it all works. As you can see in the video, I'm still struggling with the awkward controls at times, but all in all, it has been an incredibly easy run, which cost me no medigels, health packs or missiles. Naturally, you cannot be so reckless on gold difficulty, but this is more of a demonstration and an experiment rather than, "Look at how fucking special I am". Like all competent Harrier Turians, she still tops the scoreboards on gold.

-Cat

The Co-op Wars

In my teenage years I had a best friend and I had some angry parents, who hated said best friend with a passion. He dropped out of school, he was a fat and lazy bastard and I looked like a real catch next to him. But I wasn't friends with him because he made me look good. He was my best friend, because we both loved junk food and video games. This is the kind of stuff that makes everyone love those Pegg/Frost movies. Because you look at these guys and think, "Yeah, that's us." At the very least, you'll cry a bit on the inside and wish you had a friendship like that with someone. You know, Shaun of the Dead and all that.
Having a best friend was mandatory in the 8 and 16bit era. Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Turtles in Time, Secret of Mana, Knights of the Round - you could only truly enjoy these games with a friend. Not any friend, not some item-hogging, teamkilling bastard, but a guy who wouldn't hesitate to give his last extra life for you. Someone just as stupid and nerdy as you, who would live these games, fight by your side until the credit roll. No homo!

Teamplay and gaming skills were not the only requirement for this kind of special bond. One would also have to sport a healthy dose of tolerance. Among guys, it's perfectly normal to wake up on the couch one morning at 2pm, find your gamer friend sleeping on the floor in only his underpants, his face stuck in a half-empty pizza carton, his butt raised up into the air. He would respond to your kicking with a loud fart. A sign of life, which also meant: "I'm ready for more gaming, let me just eat the rest of my pizza and grab another beer." Men don't need words.
Sadly, some people grow up, get a job, start a family and then they have to be all mature. No weekend-long gaming sessions, no beating the piss out of Death Adder, no more battles against the Foot Clan. And once we took video games out of the picture, it turned out we had very little in common and my best friend was a pretty dumb, boring fucker. No hard feelings.

Being the lucky bastard that I am, the whole 'get a job or spend all day gaming' issue has pretty much fixed itself for me. As for having a talented gaming partner for all those cooperative multiplayer games, well...

I got it covered. Maybe it's time for a better camera, though.

Please take note that she is not licking a fucking gamepad and/or biting the cord on this picture.
Now, I'm not gonna give you any of this 'hurrdurr my gaming buddy has a vagina and I'm allowed to touch it' bullcrap. Whenever people do this to me, I automatically assume they're either full of shit or the girl they're referring to is hideously ugly.
So yeah, in a way we've got the old Pegg/Frost thing going, with one pair of tits being slightly less fat and hairy, but with all the pizza, farting, underpants gaming and all the disgusting guy stuff, that suddenly turns borderline sexy or into some kind of fetish when there's a girl involved. Not the farting. I really wish she wouldn't do that all the time.

Ironically, whenever my family decides to contact me, they do so with no end of pity and self-entitled compassion. They consider me some kind of cave-dwelling underachiever, who will never get to enjoy the finer things in life, such as driving around Italy in a fancy sports car or ordering a Spanish maid to clean my four bathrooms. Yes, my parents used to be wealthy like that and I'm a bit of a bad apple, if you get my meaning.
Well. I'm preparing for the Bioware Live Stream, eating tasty Serrano Ham straight out of the packet and scratching my nuts (with the OTHER hand!), because I refuse to wear pants in my office. Fuck Italy, fuck living in a big, fancy house, fuck slaving away in an office 12 hours a day. Cheers!

Alas, not everything is perfect in our happy gamer relationship. And that's because women, much unlike men, are not designed to be cooperative in any shape, form or way. Anyone who has ever witnessed a pack of lady-hyenas chatting about a female coworker on any average day at the office will know.
"That's the third time she's wearing that dress! I wouldn't dare walk around like that if my legs were so fat!"
-"She could at least shave them. And, just between us, that also goes for her face."
"What do you mean?"
-"Didn't you see? She's growing a beard! She's not a real blonde and her dark hair is starting to grow all over her upper lip. Ewwww!"
And this goes on and on and on until that very same coworker enters the room. And then...
"HiiIIIiiiii sweetie! How are you? Is everything alright?"

Men don't hate in secret. They're very open and gratuitious with that kind of thing and sometimes they punch each other in the face a bit and sort their problems that way. We don't do 'passive-agressive'. And that's why they're so great at playing cooperative games. If they're not currently shouting at you or punching you in the face, they're probably on your side and you can team up and achieve great things together, working against a common enemy and watching your back and all that.
Women don't bring their hatred out into the open. They also refuse to forget and let things go. If you cannot magically guess what's bothering them, you're already fucked.
You've all asked a girl once what's bothering her and you've all been told, "Nothing!". The most annoying, most blatant lie that all chicks tell their guys on a daily basis.

And with Claire being perfectly happy and 'nothing' being wrong, this is what happens when we play cooperative games. Note: She's Tails (on top), I'm Metal Sonic (bottom), we're a team and we're supposed to beat Sonic in a race:

You know, when she shot me, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. She might have been aiming for Sonic. But when she rammed me and pushed me off the road, causing both of us to lose the race, I couldn't help but feel that whatever grudge she's holding against me is bigger than her desire to beat this game.

One might argue that kart racers are a bit unpredictable and accidents happen. Perhaps the controls were a bit wonky. Surely, any other game would yield different results, right? Maybe something we all grew up playing, something every gamer knows by heart, something where it's impossible to fuck up on accident. Something like Mario Bros.

Claire is Luigi. Bitch.
It's one thing pacing through the level at the speed of light, hoping to get me killed by moving me off-screen. It's another to stomp my fucking face when I finally catch up, ultimately dooming me to die. Cooperative gaming, my fucking ass.

And if you think this kind of stuff only happens in games, where it's actually possible to kill your team mates, you're sorely mistaken. If I get too far ahead on the scoreboard on Mass Effect 3, Claire will go rogue. Meaning, she'll ignore all mission objectives, cease to support me as I try and fulfill the team goals on my own and just start shooting whole spawns of baddies, leaving me to die. She'll go as far as wasting all her nukes in an attempt to carpet-bomb every last enemy on the map to outscore me, even if it means we'll fail and die. Because scoring 1st place on a game over screen is that much more rewarding than 2nd place on a successful mission.
I like to believe that our relationship is healthy, happy and stable. But when it comes to multiplayer gaming, I think we'll stick to Street Fighter.

-Cat

Sammy's Weed Farm

One side effect of living in the... shall we say 'more affordable' section of town is the rather frequent rotation of interesting neighbours we get around here. Some lovely lady, who used to live in a flat above ours and, according to the locals, took great pleasure in stabbing her lovers with broken glass bottles, has recently vacated the place. The interaction I got to enjoy with her didn't go much beyond carrying a massive leather sofa down the stairs with her. However, it didn't take more than that one moment to realize she is probably the strongest person I have ever met. That monstrous piece of furniture was so unbelievably heavy, making each and every one of my bones and joints ache and crack every step of the way, yet she kept a firm grasp on her end of that thing as though it was but an inflatable toy. My first girlfriend had an inflatable armchair once. It was not a very pleasant experience.

So I moved that damn thing around the corridor with her, trying not to come across like a total pussy and she didn't even sweat. I have moved well over a dozen times and carried a lot of furniture in my life, but I have never met such a total She-Hulk before. I'm pretty sure Godzilla looks her up for handjobs. There isn't much else I can say about her, since I'm not exactly the most social type and with people moving in, on and out all the fucking time, there's very little point in trying to get to know them. A new guy has already moved in, he's Italian and that's all I know and all I'm hoping to ever know until he's gonna move again in a few months. I have lived in a house with Italians twice before and it was always... entertaining.

The first time was back in Germany, right next door to mine. I think his name was Bastardo. At least that's how his wife would address him every day, at the top of her lungs. Bastardo would sit on the porch and smoke, sometimes he'd aimlessly wander up and down the street, he never greeted anyone, never responded when I said hi. He had the saddest face I have seen in my life. He wasn't just Al Bundy "I hate my wife, my job and my whole life, but beer and tits cheer me up!" kind of sad. That guy was so sad, no amount of tits in the world could do anything to make him happy. He wasn't simply a man, who had lost the will to live. He had already died a long time ago. And whenever he came back from smoking, wandering around, delaying the inevitable, he'd shuffle back into his apartment, right next to mine, and the yelling would continue. She'd scream and shout and freak out, sometimes an elderly lady, presumably her mother, came to visit and they'd yell at him together and he never yelled back. Even the creepy Korean, who would always wait in front of my window to stare at me when I got up and got dressed for work every morning, looked sorry for poor old Bastardo whenever they started yelling next door.
Ahh yes, the Korean. Parking his car directly in front of my window, always watching, always happening to be there in the morning, whenever I got out of the shower. In his defence, I was ten years younger and probably a tad less heavy back then. And after work, he'd park right there again, in the same spot, rather than anywhere near his own damn window. I pissed on that damn car more often than I could count. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure it would have bothered him had he known about that.

The next Italian neighbour was in aforementioned upstairs flat right here in England. He had a name so awesome, I couldn't possibly make it up: Samuel Capone. I bet he also had a kickass nickname, like, Sammy "The Knife" Capone or something. It's shit like this, which makes it so incredibly difficult to resist making smartass remarks for an invisible audience or an imaginary camera, like my life was some kind of sitcom. Capone turned his humble abode into some kind of plantation. He grew and smoked so much weed up there, the smell was everywhere! It crawled down the stairs, flooded the corridor, came into our living room, the whole damn street smelled like the Netherlands (which has also been confirmed by my Dutch neighbour).
His presence probably helped my writing a lot. Even the fucking flowers in our front yard were high. Eventually, he just disappeared after skipping the rent for three months. We took his microwave oven. Oh well. New Italian guy living upstairs now. I can't wait to see what fun new stuff I'll experience with this one. I should keep an eye out for mail in the corridor to see if he's got a cool name. Tony "Scarface" Corleone or something. I'd like that.

Also: Aliens. Not of the Colonial Marines variety, but Xcom: Enemy Unknown, half a year after it was cool. I remember friends and guild mates mysteriously disappearing when this game came out, only to emerge every once in a while in order to complain about game-breaking bugs. From what I had gathered, the game was awesome, insanely addictive and horribly bugged and broken all at the same time. So I waited for patches, updates, some DLC, you get the idea. Now I'm playing it. Fuck.
Um... yall know what the Xcom reboot is about, right? Aliens invading earth, fight back the bad guys in tactical, turn-based combat and all that?
I like that shit. Organize a squad. Micro-management. The kind of stuff no damn RPG ever does anymore these days. When played right, Xcom is so oldschool and so hardcore, it'll make you cry. I won't lie to you. I'm not playing it right.

You see, in Xcom you don't just have one of your guys running across the map all Rambo-style, ignoring cover and taking on a dozen baddies all by himself. You will die. And not just like PEW-splat-AIEEE-dead kinda die. The game will brutally murder you. The camera will zoom in on your toon as the alien impales him, rips him to shreds, blood and guts splattering all over the place as the creepy fucker starts eating the twitching mess that used to be your character a minute ago. If you fuck up, you don't just lose a small amount of hit points from some infinite, endlessly regenerating pool of health. If you're lucky, your guy will only be injured and stuck in hospital for a week (meaning he might not be available on the next mission). If you're not so lucky... well, I've explained that one already. And since dead means dead, you can kiss all of your guy's skills, abilities and levels goodbye as you replace him with a rookie. Oh joy!

Seeing as I'm both a newcomer to Xcom and terrible at handling anger and frustration, I went for normal difficulty playthrough, where undoing total disaster is as easy as loading a savegame. There is also the much more serious IRONMAN mode, where the game automatically saves after everything you do, good or bad. Screw up a mission and lose your entire squad? Here, let me save your progress for you and set your failure in stone! An entire nation depended on you successfully completing that mission and now your fuck-up caused them to stop funding your Xcom project? Why, let me save again, so you won't have the money to help upgrade the squad of rookies, who are supposed to replace your fallen A-team!
That Ironman checkbox is the Oh-Shit button minus the Oh-. I love that it's there, one day I might give it a go, just to see how far I can make it without undoing all of my mistakes, but right now the thought is still much too scary.

I didn't encounter any showstopping bugs or crashes, though the game does have a few odd quirks here and there. It's a bit sad when my sniper, who gets a 100% accuracy rating at maximum range, takes aim at an alien, which is literally two inches away from him, the camera shows him drilling the muzzle right into said alien's forehead, he squeezes the trigger and fucking MISSES! Also, character customization is rather weird.
So the game puts Mr. Carlos Hernandez on my team. I'm allowed to change his name to anything I want, I can change his face, skin-tone, turn him into an old Asian dude or a young black guy. What I can't do is change his actual nationality or his gender (neither of which serve more than a cosmetic purpose) or pick his fucking CLASS, which is chosen at random the first time he levels up.

Why can't I just create a character, let alone a whole squad? Why can't I at least assign their roles rather than let the game pick whatever it thinks is best for me? What if I don't want four heavy Cuban machine gunners and an Italian sniper?
The one and only female character the game allowed me to have was one of the poor suckers who had to die on the tutorial. What I didn't know is that they can all be saved if you just skip the whole thing. But she's pretty much decomposed by now.
Of course I'm nitpicking here and the randomly generated squaddies do have their charms. So Mr. Hernandez was the only guy to survive the tutorial. The game wanted him to be a machine gunner and  when he got promoted to Captain, Xcom granted him a new nickname: Hulk. I didn't change or customise any of these details, because the game gave him a story and a bit of personality that way. I grew fond of the guy. He's a seasoned veteran now and leads my squad into every mission. Aaaand I guess Italian snipers aren't so bad. After a few hours, the game has even granted me a new pair of tits to replace the fallen tutorial ones. Another heavy gunner (duh!), no nickname yet, because she is still a rookie. Let's see if she'll live long enough to earn one.

There's also some fun news on the reptile front: Our monitor lizard has become a potential couch buddy. You can place him in your lap and, depending on his mood, he might just stay there and go to sleep. We had him out for an hour and chilled out with him. I think he'd stay even calmer if Claire wouldn't constantly pick him up, fondle him and fuss over him the whole time, but she sure as fuck knows how to tame a lizard. I'm almost disappointed it all went to quickly and easily. According to the manual and friends with monitors, it can be a painful, time-consuming and frustrating process, but our little friend has been incredibly easy thus far. I like that. He's also getting a nice new tank this Saturday, so he'll have much more space all for himself. Yay!

-Cat

Wealthy, paranoid and boring

The week started off with a surprise: Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs somehow came up with the idea that we should get a whopping 400 Quid, so they went and put that straight in my bank account. Along with a little letter, explaining it was legally due to us and what have you. So Claire and I sat down and did what every sane person would do in our situation: We got fucking paranoid.

Let's recap 2013 thus far: The whole thing kicks off with the biggest work order, followed by the most handsome amount of money I've ever received since I got this job. Followed by a surprise, "Dude, where's your other article", which resulted in even more extra money. And now this. Now, I don't know how stuff works for you people out there, but whenever something good happens to us, life will instantly take it back and then shit on us. From hospital trips and heart problems to having no money  for food, rent and electricity to sick and disappearing pets and our wedding getting postponed ad nauseam, we've drastically lowered the bar for a good day to "We're still alive, we had something to eat and there's probably something on the telly." We're humble like that.

We've been engaged for four years now and our wedding plans must have become a bit of a running gag among family members. I've been living on this Island for nearly three years and while I'm still hoping to see all the sights someday, with the way things have been going for us, I really just know this place through Countrywise. And suddenly, almost over night, the bills are paid, the accounts are balanced and we're eating fresh plant and animal matter. And if we keep up our modest lifestyle and don't go totally nuts with the surprise "wealth", we might actually make it through the year, even if things end up going just as shit for me work-wise as they were 2012. Or, if I'll end up getting lots to write about this year, we can finally do that whole marriage and vacation thing. And the PC needs some serious upgrading. We'll see. I don't like spending a whole lot of money before it's actually there. Bleh, how mature!

Speaking of mature: Does it ever stop feeling weird to do grown-up stuff? I'm not talking about anything sexy, but things like taxes, managing your income, ordering groceries and the like. Is that supposed to feel weird? Because it does to me.
Like most kids, I had my fair share of chores around the house when I lived with my parents. Depending on what combination of parents and/or step parents I had at the time, some of them were fucking slave drivers. If you have a car and no job and nothing to do all day, would you send your ten year old to the supermarket, which is a 20 minute walk away, and ask him to bring home a shitload of groceries? My first stepmother sure did. Yeah sure, it builds character, some of us had to walk 20 miles through the snow, uphill, at 5am every day, just to get to school, but come on.

Bitching and chores aside, living with your parents always makes you feel 'safe' somehow, doesn't it? I mean, the fridge is always full, you can grab whatever you like, you're not responsible for anything money-related and you never get any mail or scary phonecalls. After I had moved out, visiting my parents for the holidays or even just a weekend felt a bit like coming back to the promised land. There'd be real food in the fridge, more than I could possibly eat and drink in a week, and I could take as much as I wanted and not pay for it. Unlike most people, I never wanted to grow up, since I'm not overly interested in drinking, smoking, driving or going out, but it wasn't until I moved out that I realized just how much it sucks to be an adult. Once again, I don't count sexy stuff. You don't have to be an adult for that, anyway. After all, I'm fucking German. The stuff you Brits call soft porn is nothing but a shower gel commercial where I'm from.

The weirdest thing about the way I do my grown-up stuff today is how I seem to become more boring and less... I dunno, weird? After I had moved out, I felt like a total renegade when I had pizza for breakfast, cereal for dinner or nothing but spaghetti all week long. Because I'm my own boss now, I can do what I want, eat what I want, when I want. Today? I cook a proper meal every night and save leftovers for the next day. I'm waiting for a Tesco order right now and it contains fucking apple juice. WHAT HAVE I BECOME?? I've gone from "It's 3am, let's fucking raid McDonald's!" to "Well, there's still some chicken in the kitchen, but it's a little late to eat now. Better save it for tomorrow." Rargh! And it's not just me, who is getting gradually more reasonable and dull. When I look at Facebook, it feels like all of my friends are getting married and/or having babies.
I have reached a point where simply knowing that I can go out there right now, show my credit card and get 200 boxes of cereal, which I could eat right out of the box, in my underpants, is so good, I don't actually have to do it. If I went to a party in town, they'd probably ask me if I was waiting to pick up my kid or something. I'm not cool anymore, my penis is off the radar. If Claire ever realizes that she could do so much better, I'm gonna have to flirt in the 30+ category. Brrrrr!

But on to happier things. This thing, in particular:

"After much review and consideration, Acony Games and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) have mutually made the decision to discontinue development on the free-to-play FPS game, Bullet Run. As a result, SOE and Acony will sunset the game and end all game services for Bullet Run on March 8, 2013. We would like to thank the players for their dedication and support of the game."

I reviewed this game a little while back, gave it a 1/10 rating and said I'd rather drink a whole bottle of Tabasco through my ass than spend another minute with this garbage. Now they cancelled it. I don't wanna take all the credit for that, but my review was the only one at the time. I like to believe that I helped a little.
So why does that make me happy? Because it tells me that I still know how to do my job. I wasn't so sure about that after I had reviewed a very early version of The War Z in November last year. Basically, the game had just been released in a rather unfinished beta state and, as it goes with budget titles, we were already working on reviewing the game in that state. The rule of thumb is - if they're already charging money, you can do a review. Some might argue that you can't review something that isn't even finished, but is an MMO ever finished? Besides, there's a date and version number under every review, clearly stating that the scores are based strictly upon what's already there. Things can always go up or down at a later date.

Anyhow - this particular game was a blatant, shameless copy of the popular Arma II mod "DayZ". When asked why both games were nearly identical with their naming and gameplay, the War Z designer assured everyone that it's all a coincidence, their game had been in the making for years, DayZ didn't even exist when they got started with their game, that kinda crap. As a critic, you wanna believe these things to some extent. Tiny, ambitious developer, promising concept, you don't just go and shit all over their stuff, so you go with their story. Support the little guy and all that. And while the game was still missing some key aspects and features planned for a later release, the basic concept was there and actually seemed rather fascinating to me. If you're not familiar with the whole thing, you're basically in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and you're supposed to survive as long as you can, fighting thirst, hunger, zombies, infections and other players when they turn out to be greedy assholes.

Long story short, I gave the whole thing 66%. It lacked polish and there was no real long-term motivation, all of which had been noted and criticized in the review and that's that. And time went by, the lead dev made some bad press when he referred to some players as faggots. Somebody took a closer look at the War Z terms of service and noticed that they were a direct copy of the terms from League of Legends, up to a point where the War Z guys couldn't even be bothered to remove the name 'League of Legends' from the text they stole. Then some other smart guy noticed how the "artwork" on the War Z banner wasn't original, but really just a collage of stolen and mildly photoshopped images from other websites and tv shows such as The Walking Dead. And of course the whole story about how The War Z had been in development for years and wasn't just a ripoff turned out to be a lie. The list goes on (for the whole story, look here), but I'll go ahead and sum it all up by saying that the game's lead designer is a complete asshole and a lying scumbag.

Several months after my review, the game was released on Steam in the same incomplete, unfinished state I had reviewed it in. Difference being, they now openly advertised the long list of missing features as though they were finally implemented, up to a point where pissed off customers demanded their money back by the ton and Steam kicked The War Z right out again. What's worse, the whole thing was now infested with cheaters, flying and teleporting around the map to shoot random players and take their stuff. Metacritic lists The War Z with an abysmal score of 23%, which isn't much of a surprise. After several months of lying, stealing and blatant copying, as well as months without any development whatsoever, it's easy to bash the shit out of a bad game and the guy who is trying to sell it. Of course this is also making my 66% review score look utterly stupid, even though none of that stuff had happened by the time I wrote my article. I fucking missed it

This is seriously annoying. Explaining why a game is or isn't fun and worth playing is probably the most important aspect of any review. But something I find equally important is finding the black sheep and punishing them for trying to scam people, for lying and ripping them off. As a gamer, nothing pisses me off more than spending a lot of money on a game, which ends up lacking a whole lot of its promised features. When I don't get what they promise for my cash. Maybe Dungeon Lords has traumatized me a bit there, I dunno.
So when Bullet Run got cancelled, it felt good! Not because it's a bad game (which is it) or because I'm on some personal crusade against the publisher (which I'm not) or anything. But because they were selling something that didn't even exist! Their whole website is a collection of lies, bullshots and false advertising.

So I bashed it. I said that whatever game it is that they're advertising on the official website, it sure as hell ain't Bullet Run. And now it's going down. No more Bullet Run! Ha! Of course that would have happened one way or another, they probably don't even know my review exists. But that's not the point. I'm just happy that my bullshit detector is still functional. That said, I really hope nothing else is gonna set that thing off for a long while now. FFXIV relaunch, I'm looking at you!

-Cat

Ja! Watch mein retroen!

People ask me: "Kitten, why don't you get a proper job? Why won't you ever do the housework, take care of the laundry or put some fucking pants on and go outside?" Well, dear children, that's because I love video games and avoiding all chores and real work allows me to put that many hours of gaming into each day. Be like me! Fuck school! Fuck jobs! Be unemployed! Be gamers!

And since I have so much time on my hands, I get the chance to try weird new shit like this:

After the so-so original All Stars Racing, Sega finally managed to put at least some interesting franchises into their new game. The Golden Axe music (at the end of the video) as well as Gillius Thunderhead himself, are welcome additions to this kart racer. The first time I heard parts of the original Panzer Dragoon soundtrack on this game, I grew a major nostalgic boner. You should have seen it and you would have been proud. While I'm generally not in favour of techno remixes, I'm fully aware that an unaltered version of that old game's OST simply isn't very suitable for racing, so they did the right thing.

That said, the other 50% of the game are still plain meh. Football Manager? Super Monkeyball? Samba de Amigo? Does anyone in the US and Europe give a shit about any of these games? Do we really want to race a fucking football manager?
I was born and raised an orthodox Segan, but even I know that the guys at Nintendo are so much more aware of their own franchises and how popular they are. They know how to milk that shit. Dear Sega, why does Ristar only get a cameo appearance? Why are Toejam & Earl and Vectorman only considered for possible future updates? And what the fuck happened to James Pond and Rocket Knight Adventures? I understand that you have to put that annoying Alex Kidd in there, even though everybody hates him, but the way you blatantly ignore Phantasy Star and Shining Force hurts my inner child more than Michael Jackson ever could.

Oh, speaking of retro - I've recorded a few moments of Ragnarok Online 2 noob gameplay, just in case you're somewhat familiar with Ragnarok:

Alas, the game comes at least 5 years too late. In absolutely every way. It was supposed to be released well over a half decade ago, technically it's close to WoW classic and the gameplay, well... WoW classic at best. I really wanted to fight my way up to knighthood, have a go at Baphomet, do all the cool shit I loved about the first Ragnarok, but after the first 100 or so "Kill 5 X" quests and the usual amount of FedEx, I just couldn't take it anymore.

It's the kind of shit that drives me away from all MMORPGs. Even if the quest system was a bit more active and engaging like it's done in Guild Wars 2, I just don't have the patience to spend several weeks leveling up a single character, only to spend the next couple of months hanging out with raid guilds to farm a set full of stupid purple items. One might argue that all RPGs are about progress and building a character. Thing is, one should enjoy the way there, not loathe it and hate how time-consuming it is. If you've ever played P&P RPGs, I'm pretty sure you've done so for the fun of it, the stories, the company and not just suffered through the whole thing because you were hoping for some phat lewt at the end of the night. But that's exactly how MMORPGs feel to me today. I repeat stuff I hate to get items I want. And once I have these items, well... it's fun to parade around town for a day or two, until you realize that everyone already owns the same shit and people don't really care about your gear, anyway. Unless your gear is shit, of course. They'll care about that, trust me.

Of course what I'm doing on Mass Effect right now makes me a bit of a hypocrite. It all started with this:

I soloed gold difficulty. Twice.

And got this fun new "Lone Wolf" banner as a reward.

This is probably the most difficult title you can obtain in ME3 multiplayer, because it's the only one which requires a certain amount of skill rather than just grinding. All the other titles require you to play a certain amount of matches, kill a certain amount of baddies, stuff you always do while you're just playing, anyway.
Well. It's almost the most difficult one to obtain. There is one more title, 'Best of the Best', which requires you to obtain Lone Wolf and every single other title out there. So I'm going for that one now, because of everything I said in the first paragraph.

So, doesn't that mean I'm just repeating shit I hate over and over again, just to get a stupid title? Maybe a little bit. But it's not really like running the same old raid instance for weeks until I throw up. In order to get this thing done, I need to master a huge amount of characters and guns. Finish X amount of matches with this character, survive X waves with that character, score X points with a certain gun, you get the idea. I have all classes and weapons unlocked, there is no lengthy leveling treadmill like on an MMO, so all I have to do now is play the game with different toons and gear each day, reach the requirement and move on to the next one. It's utterly pointless, but it's fun. Every idiot can be good with their one favourite character, set of skills and items, but it's a lot tougher to get good with all of them. Besides, there simply isn't a very large amount of players with that title around, so there are bragging rights involved. Yay!

I don't think we've ever geeked out over a game so much. I mean, look at this shit:

"I wanna move to Mass Effect!"

It's quite possibly the coolest game universe I know. And one of the best sci-fi ones, at that. Because let's face it: Every fucking idiot can create a fantasy setting. Medieval setting, orcs, elves and dwarves and all their racial stereotypes, add a few dragons and whenever something doesn't add up and makes no fucking sense, you explain it away with magic. There's no need to be creative or original. Right, Tyr, Loken, Thorim, Freya, Hondir and Mimir? :P
Good science fiction is so much harder, because it needs to be plausible. You're working with technology, which is entirely fictional, but based on theories and physics, which make the entire thing somewhat believable and understandable. Shit has to make sense. I've known nerds, who could easily hold hour-long speeches on how the Enterprise's fucking warp drive works. It's not fucking space magic, it's matter and antimatter and a what have you. Okay, Mass Effect rarely gets that detailed and technical, but it's original, unique and plausible. It's just more inventive than, "Let's mix bloodthirsty orcs, steampunk dwarves and furries and call them Charr!" There, I said it. They're furry orcs, who build steam tanks. It's simply not that innovative.

Anyhow, enough bitching. I'm running out of precious Sunday. More gaming needs to be done! Onward!

-Cat

Dat furniture and a blast from the past

Ahh Monday. You know it's Monday when you get an email asking, "Hey, where's your article on that game you were supposed to review?" and you have no memory of said game, an article or a work order of that sort. The way it usually happens with this kinda stuff is pretty sweet: I get an email or a phone call telling me what articles I'm supposed to write, I take care of said articles, I get money, everyone's happy. I used to get emails listing each and every article and we'd arrange a firm deadline for everything. But since I never miss any of these deadlines and I'm generally pretty fast with this stuff, things have become a little less strict and formal. I get shit done, no need to make things overly complicated. Except, today I didn't get shit done. I was completely unaware of the shit I had to get done. Whoops!
Oh well. Downloading the new "work" game right now, then I'll get right to it. The good thing about "extra" work (or work you didn't know you were supposed to do) is the extra money you weren't expecting. And with Valentine's day around the corner, well... maybe we should just go out. Yay!

We have rolled on some epic RL loot. I call it 'The Behemoth':

The amount of excitement this piece of furniture rouses in me makes me feel incredibly old. It's something you sit on, nothing more. It's not a fucking gaming console, it doesn't do my laundry and it's not even a new pet. It's a god damn butt shelf! But damn is it comfy!
Our living room has always been functional, if you can all it that. A comfy armchair, a small leather sofa for the bear, some wooden emergency chairs for surprise visitors and that's about it. Which is fine, we rarely have guests and there are more than enough placement options for our two asses. It just didn't allow for much more than, well, sitting.

When I caught that awful stomach bug a while back, I would have loved to stretch out for a bit. You can't really do that on an armchair. I could have done it on the little sofa, but since that doubled as Claire's computer seat, it was never really an option. Heck, even a stupid nap was problematic, because how the hell are you supposed to sleep on a little two-seater when your significant other wants to park her ass on there to check her email or do some online gaming? I always had to move to the bedroom. And that always sucked. If you doze off in front of the tv, you'll wake up after a while, you still notice what's going on around you, you're still "there". But when you nap in the bedroom, you gotta set an alarm to make sure you won't oversleep and then you toss and turn and keep counting the minutes of nap time you have left before the alarm goes off. Boo!

And how boring is it to watch a movie with a loved one when you're not even in touching distance with one another? Sure, we could have sat on the little sofa together, but that's not very enjoyable for movie night. Seriously now: If you're at home, nobody to bother you, nobody looking, on a no pants day, lazing around, having some junk food, watching the telly - are you going to sit up straight all fucking night long? Of course not! You engage bone melt mode, cat out, relax in the most ridiculously pathetic pose you can possibly assume. And to us, that usually meant one of us gets the sofa, the other one gets the chair. No fondling, no making out, no fun. Meh.

But The Behemoth changed everything. Including the arrangement of some of my bones. Our upstairs neighbour is moving out. Can't wait to see the next bunch of psychos moving in up there. Can it get any worse than the guy who grew his own weed farm up there? Or band practice at 4am guy? Or captain of the gay naked wrestling team guy? Probably. Time will tell. In the meanwhile, our current neighbour has no room for The Behemoth where she is going. She wanted to hack it to bits and throw it out. Long story short, that leathery monstrosity has been offered to us. And I thought, "Hey, how heavy can it possibly be?" when I decided to carry it downstairs with only one helper. Me going down first, so I'd get to carry most of the weight. On my arms, then, when said arms turned to bony pudding, balancing the damn thing on my head. I no longer believe it's just a regular couch. It's an elephant. They pounded it into its current shape with a sledge hammer, but it's definitely an elephant. I still feel the pain just from looking at the damn thing!

So we put Mr. Elephant where the little sofa used to be. Fun. Now we had to decide on a new spot for that old thing. The drama! The horror! I wanted to put it near The Behemoth, in a 90 degree angle, keep them close to each other, maybe put a table there, make the whole thing a bit more social. You know, in case we have guests or maybe we just wanna eat dinner off a fucking table for a change! I just like the idea of being able to sit around a table together, if only to place drinks and snacks on there or whatever.
It looked shit. It looked so unbelievably shit! It may have worked if it wasn't for our fake fireplace and how the small sofa was parked directly in front of it, but now it looked like we were trying to burn the damn thing.

Long story short - I have some kind of reading and chillout corner now. We moved the old sofa where our epic scratch post used to be - now I can hang out on there, stare at the clouds through our massive window, stretch out when watching the telly and if I feel social, I can hang join Claire on The Behemoth, which is so big that we can both relax and cuddle on there for tv or I can just sit and watch her when she's gaming. The downside to this whole setup is that we had to get rid of aforementioned scratch post. It was rather massive, took up the entire back wall of the living room, went all the way up to the ceiling and the cats had been interested in it for about two weeks. Damn thing cost over 200 Quid, we had it flown over from Germany, a real kitty daycare centre... now it has gone to the neighbour. Only seemed fair, since we got her couch and all that. Oh well.
Kinda weird to be trading stuff like that, especially since I'm really not the social type and all. I'm just not the kinda guy who goes and makes friends with the neighbours or takes any interest in the local "community", but I guess there's a first time for everything.

Speaking of first times: Remember your first ever MMORPG? I did try Everquest and Ultima Online, but the first MMORPG that got me seriously hooked, the first thing I have spent monthly fees on, that really kept me playing all night and day was Ragnarok Online. To my own defence, that was over a decade ago and back then there was absolutely nothing like it. It featured anime-ish 2d characters, which remotely resembled console RPG characters from the 16bit era. They looked a bit like what you'd see in Secret of Mana, Shining Force, that kinda thing. Then you'd explore some crude, blocky 3D worlds, listen to the cheesiest soundtrack I've ever experienced in any online game and grind, grind and grind some more. Ragnarok is the mother of all grinders, there were no real quests to speak of and you didn't even move around much. You'd stay in one zone for ten or so levels, then slowly move on to the next bit. Moving from one zone to another could easily result in instant death, because the level gaps between areas were huge.
Happy days. You started the game as a jobless 'Novice' with no particular abilities or skills and fought your way up the first few levels to earn the right to train for a basic profession. You know, the usual suspects like mage, swordsman, thief, that kinda thing. Later on, you'd upgrade your swordsman to knight or crusader, your mage would turn into a powerful wizard and so on, you'd form a guild, occupy a castle and then fight other guilds for their castles, have huge pvp raids, really fun stuff. RO couldn't possibly compete with WoW, which had been released not very long after the international launch of Ragnarok, so that pretty much put an end to my exploits on there, but being my first ever MMO, I will always remember it fondly.

When the hype slowly began to die down, the guys behind the game had begun working on Ragnarok 2. Full 3d, more features, more of everything, holy crap. Everyone got so hyped up about it! And it looked great, until it got cancelled. Then they tried to relaunch it with all kinds of weird new shit. Strange new playable races (all playable characters were human in the original RO), guns, the whole thing didn't look or feel like Ragnarok at all. Eventually, the whole thing got scrapped again and RO2 turned into a bit of a joke. They did release some early alpha client at some point, which looked rather promising, but the whole thing got leaked, people put it on freeshards with the help of server emulators and lots of folks were already playing it before the game was ready for an actual release. It was all a huge mess.
All of this happened so many years ago, I just gave up on the idea of having another Ragnarok. There were some weird spin-offs and handheld adaptions, but the franchise had been sucked dry. I still have Ragnarok Tactics, the latest bastard of the series, on my PSP. It's not a bad game, but some monster and character designs aside, the game has absolutely nothing to do with Ragnarok. It's amazing how the name still seems to sell.

Imagine my surprise when I tripped upon the open beta of the actual Ragnarok Online 2! Apparently, the whole thing had come out a few months ago and I completely missed it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly looking for anything Ragnarok and, as I have stated in my previous post, I'm getting tired of MMOs. But I couldn't resist looking into the revival of an old favourite. I only had the chance to get to level 5 or 6, but my first impression is that of a WoW-clone with RO setting, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The localization is as shitty as ever - I cannot even launch the damn game unless I set my Windows to Singaporean, which is highly annoying. And don't get me started on the ingame text. It's Ragnarok, alright.

I'm a swordsman and I'm hunting porings. Sounds and feels like RO, but looks like WoW.

The visuals, interface, controls, gameplay, everything about this game screams WoW so far. Never been a huge fan of WoW's style, but I'll admit that it fits the RO universe rather well. And riping off the most popular game isn't always a bad thing. One feature I have immediately noticed is the dungeon finder, which lets you team up for the instanced dungeon as a tank, healer or DPS. Beats the free for all dungeon sessions on the original, which were all about stealing kills and loot off of random players. Baddies drop gear with the usual colour-coding (green, blue, purple), which is fun. I looted extra bags for more inventory space. Fun. The game also assumes that I've never played an MMORPG before, so it forces me through quests, which have me loot monsters, pick up glowy mushrooms, gather rocks with a pickaxe and do all those other chores you've seen a million times in just about every MMORPG out there. Do we really need tutorials for this stuff? Still? Sure, it's nice of the game to mention that all these features exist, but I'd rather just kill shit.

Ah yes, killing shit: Hotkeys, auto attack, also just like WoW. Not very exciting, but less awkward than the first RO. Got a so-called pandora's box off of a baddie. The key to which is sold at the cash shop. Derp. Then I got a pandora's mallet off another baddie, which cracked the box open. Got an epic ring out of it. Instant happiness. Got an epic shield out of the next one, which I'll be able to use once I upgrade my swordsman to knight. Fucking carrot on a fucking stick. I wanna be a knight. I want my own mount. I wanna be able to use that epic shield. And whenever I kill another bunch of monsters I get a new sword, some new helmet, stuff that actually shows on my toon and makes him look a little cooler. I like that. Many F2P MMOs drop little to no gear or only useless shit, RO2, at least at the early stages which I have seen, does not. Killing baddies feels rewarding that way.

I also get to distribute attribute points upon level ups, which allows for a touch of individualism, at least in theory. But since there are only so many useful choices per class, you won't see a whole plethora of "builds" per character. Same goes for the very limited skill trees. You get some small amount of viable options, the rest is simply pointless. Level up intelligence on a warrior? Make your sorcerer super strong? DPS Aura for your knight, which lowers his defence? Yeah, didn't think so.
Oh well. First impression is pretty solid, aside from the lousy localization. The grind is now neatly wrapped into short quests, the level ups have been pretty quick so far and the game looks and sounds as stomach-turningly cute as ever. I probably wouldn't go anywhere near it if I hadn't been so addicted to its predecessor. Of course the whole thing might turn out to be broken, incomplete and unfinished after the starting bit. I'll only find out if I keep playing. But now I gotta get back to work. An MMO about football. I don't like football. But the idea sounds cool enough. I'm curious.

-Cat

Reptiles, furniture and MMOs

I've reached a point where I'd receive about a dozen or so spam comments on random blog posts every day. Stupid spam bots linking online pharmacies, acne creme and god knows what else all the fucking time. So, for as much as I hate all this captcha-nonsense, it is now activated for the comments section. Most of you don't leave comments, anyway, so it's probably not a big deal.

On to happier news: Lizards! Yaaay! Lookie:

He still isn't tame, of course, but we're reaching a point where chilling out with him in front of the tv might become an option. We do that with our beardies a lot and I don't see why our new friend here couldn't get used to it at some point. Well, I guess sharp, nasty teeth and a dangerous tail-whip might be a bit of a point, of course. But hey, who's gonna be a pussy about that? One day he'll be all nice and big and we can walk him around outside. It's a shame he'll never bite the faces off random kids, but I suppose we could always look into buying a dog.

We're having a bit of a furniture battle here right now. Our neighbour is getting rid of her epic large leather sofa and since we always wanted a bigger one, well... yeah. Lucky us. Problem is, we now have to find a spot to put the old, smaller sofa when the new one takes its place. And, while I'm not particularly proud of it or anything, I'm just that much better at interiour decoration than Claire. And we can't agree on a place to put the old sofa. I hope she'll give in and let me decide. But you know how it goes - "I have the vagina, I make the rules." Sigh.

Our exploits on Guild Wars 2 might have come to a bit of a halt. We've played so many MMORPGs now, from WoW to Everquest to Age of Conan to god knows what else and we've reached a point where starting a brand new toon, killing 25 boars and LFTank till the level cap and farming tokens till full epic gear has become more than a bit stale. The game is still great, we love our little guild and all that, but behind the pretty facade of artistic pixels, it still feels like the same old game.
Sure, some games change the pace of the combat system, other games add an interactive story or remove the tank-healer-dps trinity, but at the end of the day, they're all World of Warcraft with different visuals. I'm exaggerating a bit here, of course, but the basic gameplay simply doesn't change very much. And we're bored.

The problem with the tremendous success of WoW is how everyone just plays it safe and doesn't really come up with anything new. Of course you'll see that everywhere in the gaming industry. Just look at all the Modern Warfares, Assassin's Creeds and Need for Speeds out there, to name a few. Play it safe, release the same stuff over and over again, go with the things that you know will sell. And how innovative can you really get with an MMORPG, anyway? There will always be weeks upon weeks of leveling your toons, followed by weeks, possibly months, of repetitive grinding for gear. Or go with the "no endgame grind" option and people will whine about, well, no endgame.

I suppose it's all down to attitude and expectation. Don't like the endgame grind? Bored of leveling yet another toon? Stop playing, plain and simple. Perhaps it just isn't realistic to expect new MMORPGs to be enjoyable for several years without taking long breaks from it. I have friends and family members, who still play WoW like crazy, every day, countless hours. They all moan about how boring it has become, how much the community sucks, how it's no longer what it used to be, but for some fucked up reason, they're always on there. Never to play anything else. Not for more than a week or two, anyway. Makes me think. I look at some exciting new game and somehow I hope this could be my WoW, my addiction, the one game that keeps me happy year after year after year. Utterly stupid.

I hate repetition. I hate routine. When I first got into MMORPGs, I was excited with the idea of experiencing a role playing game with thousands of others, making new friends, competing with others and actually playing a role. You know, become your character and what not. Yeah, we all know how that works out. First of all, most MMORPGs are designed to make you HATE every player around you. They grab your quest items, roll on your loot, leave your group in the middle of a dungeon and without their help, you're a worthless maggot. Even Guild Wars 2, the game, which aims to make playing with others more enjoyable, will fuck you hard if your dungeon party sports at least one complete idiot who screws up the puzzles, timed events or the slightly more complex boss battles. One asshole can ruin the gaming experience of everybody around them.
MMORPGs also burst your "I'm the greatest hero around" bubble. Got that epic Hackmaster +5 you're oh so proud of, because it's a really rare drop from some incredibly tough boss baddie? Well, everyone around you already has one, too. They probably have the +12 upgrade as well. And you don't. You're not special in any way. Chances are, you're just average. If you're lucky. And don't get me started on role-playing and people acting in character. There are no rules, there's no moderation, everybody has their own interpretation of "RP" and in most games, the vast majority of people just won't give a fuck. When you look at it, MMORPGs are like super slow, repetitive RPGs, which force you to team up with a bunch of people you hate. I miss Skyrim.

We're taking a break from GW2 right now. We're gamers, we're stupid and I'm pretty sure that some stupid shit like TESO, which we currently don't care about one bit, will become incredibly attractive a few days before release and then I'll start bitching about it a month later. But in the meanwhile, we're having some mindless fun on ME3 multiplayer. Of course that's also repetitive, with its one game mode and its dozen or so maps, but we can play that as a duo, without anyone interfering, without putting up with anyone's bullshit, without grinding for epix or spending two weeks leveling a new necromancer. Jump in, play, done. Nice and simple. It's nothing to keep you busy for countless months like MMORPGs are supposed to do, but it's a nice distraction from the boring grind.

-Cat