The awesome folks at Trion Worlds were nice enough to send a bunch of ArcheAge founder's packs to the editing office and I was one of the lucky people to receive one. I have just taken my first few steps into the game and while I haven't seen the game's most promising features like siege battles or travel at sea, what I did see was a bit... underwhelming. I'm converting a gameplay video right now, so be sure to check my Youtube channel or this blog later.
It looks decent, but it runs like shit.
ArcheAge uses the CryEngine 3 and is easily one of the most visually stunning MMORPGs I have ever played. It's also the MMORPG with the poorest performance I've ever seen. The game stutters and freezes like crazy and apparently my GTX 780 and my quadcore CPU are no match for this title. Another thing that bothered me right away was the music. I have picked the race of freaky, bipedal cat people for my starting character because duh. And the music in their zone sounds like the kind of stuff they play at Chinese restaurants. It's slow-paced, whiny, annoying and the first thing I turned off right after disabling public chat.
The varied landscapes are a lot of fun.
It's a Free2Play MMO and while access is currently limited to founders and a lucky few, who have been invited to the beta, I've already stumpled across players named "Pussy" and there was a whole lot of flaming, trolling and talk about boob milk going on in public chat. That's hardly the fault of the game, but it servers as a gentle reminder why I don't really care much for online games anymore these days. On that note, be prepared to compete over quest items and mobs with other players, because there is no GW2-style sharing on here, where you can just gang up on the same monster and every player gets their progress. Well, I assume it still works if you group up first, but I don't want to be in a group with a guy named Pussy.
I choose to fight alone.
Everything else I have seen so far was utterly generic. You fight baddies by clicking stuff on your hotbar, just like every other MMO before ArcheAge, save for the handfull of titles with more active combat systems. It's a lot faster than, say, WoW, and there are no long cooldowns, but in the end I found myself winning most battles by simply mashing one or two buttons. I'm sure things will get a little more entertaining at the higher levels, but the noob experience was dull and not remotely challenging.
The quests offered nothing new, either: kill 5 of these, loot 3 of those, rinse, repeat. You do get some speech here and there, which is usually accompanied by some still artwork or even a little engine-cutscene, which is nice. That said, this feature wasn't fun or entertaining enough to keep me interested in the boring quests.
Worst ArcheAge feature: My fucking mount.
Founders get a certain amount of item shop currency, so I went and bought a mount - and immediately regretted it. If you dismount your four-legged companion, he'll follow you around rather than getting unsummoned like they do on WoW. Sounds amazing, but I found myself randomly clicking and mounting the damn thing whenever I wanted to rotate the camera or interact with quest items and the stupid animal just got in the way.
Another fun feature is being able to have an extra passenger on your mount. People would constantly hop on my mount, even when I wasn't riding it, because I was fighting monsters or waiting for a boss to respawn (hellooooo 2005!). There's a button to kick unwanted passengers off, but it only took about five minutes until I had some asshole following me around and hopping on my mount over and over again, no matter how many times I booted him off. Great feature, thanks a lot!
Some quests come with cutscenes, which usually run at or below 5 FPS.
My biggest concern is a resource called "Labour". You see, enemies don't simply drop coin when you kill them. They drop a purse. Wanna open the purse and get the money out? That'll cost you a certain amount of labour. Want to identify an item? Costs more labour. As a premium player I never ran out of labour, but limiting your amount of daily actions is a dick move and it'll probably be a much bigger problem to free players.
A good Free2Play game should reward you for paying a little extra (e.g. cool costumes, experience boosters), but not punish you if you can't or don't want to afford paying up. And if you can only perform so many actions a day and then you're forced to wait for several hours before you can loot money or identify items again, that's not okay. That's punishing people for not wanting to pay and it sucks.
This is by no means supposed to be a fair, objective review. I've only played the game for an hour or two and those were my first impressions. That said, the only reason why I've stopped playing the game so early is because it didn't grip me at all when I started it and it bored me to tears a few minutes later. Again, I should probably see the PvP, the exploration and combat at sea and the post-noob content before I can fairly assess this game, but until then we're off to a bad start.
On a funnier note, Claire has hatched a new Kubrow (read: space dog) on Warframe aaaaand... well.
Oink!
Both the most fun and the most annoying feature of these companions is that you don't know what you'll get until you've hatched and raised them. My Kubrow turned into a tall, slim, gracious, almost regal creature wit long, pointed ears and long legs. She runs across the battlefield alongside my character, fights by his side, turns bad guys to shreds and everyone is happy. Like so:
And then there's Claire's new pet. Heh.
Her Kubrow is the one on the right. Eat ALL the pies!
She raised a fat, disgusting little pig, whom we can almost smell through our computers. That thing is about half the height and five times the mass of my kubrow and when it tries to keep up with its owner it causes little earthquakes and lags the servers. Okay, it's not that bad, but let's just say it's very comical and a bit tragic to watch.
I'm actually quite pleased to see just how much diversity there is from one Kubrow to another and I don't hate the little fatty or anything. Pretty much the opposite - it gives them personality. It's just funny to see a rather nice, slim, dangerous-looking Kubrow and then Claire ends up with this... pig. It's dirt-coloured, it snorts, it has a dull look on its face and it wrestles enemies like a bear. Which is pretty cool, I suppose. A bear kubrow.
And then he ate Obelix.
She said she hates her Kubrow and thinks about neglecting it until it dies (which can actually happen). Can you believe she runs a pet shop for a living? I hope she'll change her mind and that ugly, hairy booger will grow on her over time.
One thing I hate about renting a place, aside from having to pay rent and being stuck with asshole neighbours, who pay just as much rent as you do, is how they check on your place every year or so to make sure you don't shit on the carpet and invite families of gypsies to live with you or something. There's an inspection happening here in a few hours, first one in well over two years and I hate that shit. Our house had just finished decorating itself with assorted spiders and an absolutely marvelous collection of webs.
I used to hate spiders. I couldn't look at them, let alone touch them, had a bit of a phobia, thanks to some traumatic childhood moments. But our house is constantly getting invaded by the little fuckers and I suppose they have to live somewhere, right? I mean, if it's rainy outside and they're cutting down all the trees in our garden, where are they supposed to go? That's a bit of a stupid argument, I suppose, but we still ended up tolerating them after a while. The result being that we had at least three of them in every corner of every room, but we had no more mosquitoes, no moths, not much of anything that wasn't a spider.
The other day I was taking a bath (yes, that time of the year again) and I saw a spider in the corner of our bathroom, which had caught something in its web and started rotating its prey and webbing it up and it was all very fascinating. When they get too close to my computer or too close to my pillow at night or some other spot where I don't want them, it's usually enough to poke them and they get scared shitless and run off. I actually got the idea from some animated .gif, though I'm glad we don't usually get anything the size of that monster.
But today I had to get rid of all the spider webs and all my favourite garbage and old cardboard boxes and stains on the walls and doors and floors and we had to clean aaaaaall the things, because stupid inspection day. I know they don't come here to make sure we're neat and tidy, but it's always good to pretend we don't treat this place like a dump.
And then that guy will walk through every single room, stare at the ceiling as though there was something interesting going on up there, he'll take notes on his stupid little clipboard and not tell us what he's writing on there and then he'll tell us we need to paint a wall or put up some wallpaper or fix some shit that had been broken before we even moved in here. It's a fucking invasion of privacy and I don't like it. I don't like people in my bedroom. Or my bathroom. Or anywhere, really.
Aaaaand we may not have told the landlord about our new dog.
Him.
They were okay with our snake, the little lizards and the cats. But a giant monitor lizard might be pushing it a bit. I don't know. I honestly don't know what to expect. The thing is, Hugo doesn't make any noise. Okay, he can cough like an old man, especially when he's asleep and dreams up weird shit. I'm not making this up, he twitches and moves and makes weird noises in his sleep. But he doesn't bark or howl or make a mess or do much of anything, really. He produces no noise or odors. If you hate animals, he's the best kind of pet your neighbours could have. There's just the small problem that the inspection guy might not see a peaceful monitor lizard but a terrifying small dinosaur and that could cause drama.
Then again, we've lived here for well over four years, never caused any trouble (unlike all the other fuckers who live in this house), we're always on time with the rent (again, unlike certain other parties around here), so surely we've scored a brownie point there or two, right?
Still, I'm gonna have to be awake much earlier than I want to, some guy is gonna judge our home and the way we live and there's a small chance for drama involving my favourite pet, so... yeah, not looking forward to that.
On a happier note, I had the chance to record some warframe pet action footage, which has instantly scored a dislike for some inexplicable reason (seriously, if my videos are so shit, at least tell me why, so I can improve them!) and now I can't play, because Warframe is getting hit by constant DDOS attacks, which seem to be related to some stupid clan-related bullcrap on there and lots of people hating each other. I hate online games. Can we please go back to offline titles with optional multiplayer, where I can only invite my friends and loved ones and ignore everybody else? That'd be great.
If there is one thing I have learned from Shadow Dancer, it's that the only thing cooler than ninjas is ninjas with dogs. And because of that, Shadow Dancer has always been one of my favourite Shinobi games. It's also the easiest Shinobi game by far, which is a plus in my book, because I like winning.
Dog! ♥
And since they've added "Kubrows" to Warframe, which are really just fancy Sci-Fi canines, the game has become twice as fun. Well... sometimes it's twice as fun. When the fucking Kubrow behaves as intended. Also, mine finally grew up and didn't end up looking like a fucking poodle!
Aww! He must never know that I put his 11 siblings into cry-stasis, because they were hideous and/or worthless.
I'd love to share a video with you guys that shows this happy little guy racing through a starship, jumping at bad guys to tear their throats out or to literally rip them in half. Seriously, Warframe has some of the most violent, gruesome deaths you'll ever see in a game. Cut a guy in half and you'll see the guts and the ribcage and the spine and all that cool shit. Problem is, the server has been dead for hours and nobody is fixing it, because it's Sunday and most of the devs are at San Diego Comic-Con. Boo!
The problem with Kubrows is that they're not familiar with the internet, so nobody told them to never go full retard. And they go full retard a lot! There are moments where Space-Doggie does what it says on the tin and jumps enemies and rips them to shreds and everyone is happy, but from one moment to the next the AI might just go on vacation. The Kubrow just stands there. I'm getting shot by a dozen enemies and he just stands there and watches, not a care in the world. A bad guy might walk up right in front of him, punch him in the face a bit, he'll stand there and take it and bleed all over the place and not fight back.
So what does Warframe do in a situation like that? Reset the dog, give you an option to restart the AI or maybe order your companion to attack stuff? MUCH BETTER! It will fucking crash. Warframe is currently chain-crashing for lots of people, though it usually waits until you've collected a ton of super rare loot and farmed up a ton of experience points (sorry, "affinity") before doing so, in order to ruin the most amount of playtime possible.
You're just waiting to extract? Better go crash Warframe!
Sooo... it's all far from perfect, but we're getting there. It'll be pretty awesome once it all works the way it's supposed to.
On the plus side, downtime on Warframe means more time for TESO. I've reached the veteran version of the Alik'r desert now and it's pretty... pretty.
They've dumbed down veteran-gameplay adjusted veteran-difficulty a lot, so I can just walk around and kill stuff and feel like a badass, which is usually fun for a while. Still, I can only enjoy the pve for so long until the repetition gets to me. The ever-same circular dungeons are becoming increasingly lame and the "decisions" you make during quests are utterly meaningless, as they never have any real consequences. You might get a slightly different dialogue or cut-scene depending on what you choose, but the reward, the game world, the story, everything stays the same, so I usually just click random shit in dialogues to get it over with.
In other news, it has been revealed that the Warcraft movie will focus on Anduin Lothar and Durotan and the whole Orcs vs Humans crap. It's an origins story, supposed to draw people into the whole setting, even if they're unfamiliar with the lore. You know, like they did with Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I would have preferred to see Azeroth the way I know it from WoW, with naked people dancing on mailboxes and people shouting anal jokes across the badlands, so I guess I'm gonna have to wait for the next film or five.
On the plus side, Lothar was pretty badass, hanging with the prince and his buddy Medivh until he eventually ends up in charge of Stormwind's army and then he fights the invading orcs until he gets locked up in the deadmines for 20 months and finds that Medivh has betrayed them when he comes back, so he grabs his buddy Khadgar, who stabs Medivh in the heart in Karazhan and then Lothar chops his head off and they still lose to the Horde and retreat to Lordaeron and team up with the dwarves and gnomes and high elves (I think?) to fight the Horde some more, but then Lothar gets tricked by a bunch of ogres and trolls and they break his greatsword and crush his skull with a hammer... Doomsomethingorother... and then Lothar's second in command whose name I forgot destroys the dark portal and they kick the Horde out of Stormwind and now you won't have to watch the first Warcraft movie or three, because that's probably what they're gonna cover there.
Or you can be all smug and go to the movies and tell people who are unfamiliar with the story that Lothar dies in the end. Yay!
Also, my son is coming for a visit. Not today or tomorrow, because going to a different country requires time and money and planning ahead and all that, but maybe in a few months. I should buy toast.
Update 14 for Warframe went live recently, so I had a look at all the new content - and possibly a final look at the game before it gets fucked up by a possible acquisition through Perfect World Entertainment. I'll give you an example of how their greed ruins "Free2Play" games in this very entry, but let's get back to update 14 first.
The first thing I noticed upon logging in is how the bland, sterile main menu where you tweak and modify your gear, change equipment and all that sort of thing has been replaced by a little space ship, which now serves as players' base of operations. It also uses J.J. Abrams levels of lens-flares and shit.
"MY FUCKING RETINAS! Why would you do this?"
The ship offers the exact same stuff you'd normally do in the main menu, but it's a bit more immersive when you move your character around to access gear, weapon modifications and so forth. I was pretty pleased with it.
Though I am absolutely disgusted at how shit you are at Warframe when you compete against me.
I've edited a little video where you get a glimpse at the little ship. You can also see my character as he gently pets a puppy before heading for a wrecked carrier ship, which is infested by pants-shittingly scary space zombies. If you're somewhat familiar with Warframe, the puppy is part of the new Kubrow companion breeding feature and the latter is a pretty impressive update to the Infested, with new sounds, abilities, music, tilesets and what have you. BEHOLD!
What's not so great upon closer inspection is how the new Kubrow companions work. If you haven't watched the video above, here's what a Kubrow looks like:
They come in all shapes, sizes and fur tones, resembling dogs, foxes, hyenas and other fun, furry sidekicks. They're incredibly well-animated battle pets, which fight by your side, chomp down on tons of bad guys and, depending on their breed, dig up items for you or cloak or shield you in battle and so on. And they're immediately more likable than the old sentinel pets. Think about it - would you rather have a loyal canine companion, which looks and behaves a lot like a real animal or some floating machine named "Dethcube", because it's literally a floating cube that makes things go dead?
Not a joke, but an actual pet.
When it comes to aesthetics and general awwwness, the Kubrow wins hands down. Unfortunately, they're also the shittest battle pets in any game ever, if you have anything that remotely resembles a real life.
Let's start with the fact that finding a Kubrow egg in order to hatch one of these fuckers requires several hours of grinding. You're also going to need 150,000 credits to build an incubator to hatch the damn thing. And 150,000 credits is about as much as it sounds. You can, of course, skip the entire process by throwing an adequate amount of real money at the screen.
Then you wait 24+ RL hours for the damn thing to hatch. Again, if you don't want to wait, you can always skip the hatching process using cold, hard cash. And that's when you'll find out whether your new pet is a boy or a girl and which of the four different species of Kubrow it belongs to. Some kubrows dig up items like ammunition during battle (i.e. they're worthless), others support a sneaky playstyle and provide stealth buffs - you get the idea. Depending on your personal setup and preferences, the Kubrow you hatch might just not be a very good choice. So if you don't like what you have, you're gonna have to start hunting for a new egg (or spend more money in the cash shop) and repeat every step it took to get here.
Oh yeah, you're also gonna have to put the unwanted pet into Stasis, because you can't just sell/release/euthanise unwanted Kubrows. The first stasis chamber is free, the next one costs real money.
I have spent around 20 Euros worth of cash shop money (which I got for free, because my job is awesome) on Kubrow eggs, stasis chambers and other shit until I finally hatched one that works with my aggressive play style. After hatching the fucker you get to wait for up to 48 RL hours until they mature and show off their final form. Remember how I said a Kubrow can look like a fox, hyena and so forth?
These...
...guys.
Well, they can also be creme-coloured and incredibly skinny, have pointed rabbit-ears and poofy, oversized feet. Like fucking mutated poodles. Which happens to be exactly how Claire's Kubrow turned out, which is okay, since she's female, her pet is female, she has a high tolerance level for stupid shit like that.
My Kubrow puppy looks exactly the way her Kubrow looked like when it was a puppy. When that damn thing reaches maturity tonight and looks like a fucking poodle, I'm gonna eject it into space (except, I can't, so I'll have to put it into stasis for RL cash) and then I'll have to spend another 20something Euros or countless hours on more Kubrow eggs until one of the right breed comes out which doesn't look absolutely shit. I could also purchase one from another player, which, again, would cost me real money.
Or I could stop caring about aesthetics altogether, but then I may as well just stick with the goddamn Dethcube. Apparently, there was an option to change the appearance of an ugly Kubrow for a few pennies, but the community wanted it removed. You stupid fucks.
Also, Kubrows come with a whopping two abilities equipped and all the rest needs to be found. All of their abilities and skills can be dropped by feral Kubrows, which only spawn in a handful of low-level missions, which you'll be grinding, farming and repeating for days if you want to unlock all the stuff for your new pet. Have fun!
Another fun new thing is the new dark sector pvp mode, where a bunch of players attempt to hack a few terminals in order to break into a base and nuke its core, whilst the defending side has to stop them. Think Strand of the Ancients or some of the SWTOR battlegrounds. I tried one for the first time today and kicked ass, so that made me happy. I had the overall highest damage, but was only 2nd for kills, because I nuked the core while some other guys kept killing the enemy team. Which makes me a bit sad, but that's how we won, so I cannot really complain. Anyhow, if you wanna see how that looks, there's a video. If it looks like I'm a confused noob, it's because I'm a confused noob. It was the first time I tried this.
Now, why is Perfect World Entertainment such an awful bunch of greedy fucks, who exist only to make fun Free2Play games shit? Because they can. What I've linked there is the exclusive right to play the new Dragonborn race in Neverwinter, a playable race, which fans have been begging for since the game's early beta stages. The only way to play this race is by spending 95 Euros or your reguinal equivalent on this stupid item pack, which contains a whole lot of completely useless, overpriced crap. To be fair, the pack is currently on offer and will only cost 71 Euros until August. Fuck you, Perfect World and fuck you hard.
I'm aware that games like Everquest 2 tried to get away with exclusive playable races when they went Free2Play and people hated the idea so much that all the races on there are now free. SWTOR has exclusive races, but you can unlock them through an optional subscription or an amount of money, which is MUCH more reasonable than 95 fucking Euros.
I am also aware that The Elder Scrolls Online forces people to get the ridiculously expensive Imperial Edition in order to play the Imperial race. A dick move for which they've been criticized a lot - and rightfully so. And just because TESO did it doesn't make it okay to put up a 95 Euro paywall for a fucking playable race in Neverwinter.
The saddest part is how they're fully aware of how much people will hate them for it, how people will complain about it on the forums, how people like me will complain about that shit when reviewing their next content expansion, but the amount of complete and utter idiots, who are happy and willing to shell out real money for this shit far outweighs all of this. Perfect World knows that their reputation is shit, they know lots of people hate them and they don't give a fuck, because they're too busy rolling around in the money of stupid people. Thank you. Thank you, Perfect World, for being greedy bastards and a big thank you to all the morons who are willing to shell out their money on such stupid, evil shit.
To be fair, if you turn awesome source-material like this...
into shit like that, it becomes pretty difficult to feel left out for not buying them.
Awful monetization aside, I actually like Neverwinter. A huge fanbase of loyal players likes Neverwinter, keeps it alive with custom quests and tons of incredible stories and content. And this is how Perfect World Entertainment treats them. This is how they rip them off. This isn't cool. This isn't fan-service. It's insulting and disgusting.
Of course there's always the chance that they'll make the Dragonborn playable for free at a later date like they did with the Drow. But come on. 95 fucking Euros. And that very same company is currently trying to buy Warframe? I just can't fucking wait for that to happen!
When we were children, my brother and I mattered so little that I decided to never have children of my own. My old man seemed to care so little that the most fun we'd get out of him was when he tolerated us watching him play video games. That is until stuff no longer went his way and he got angry at the game and started throwing controllers around.
For my 9th birthday I didn't want any presents, I didn't want a fancy celebration or anything, I just wanted to spend an entire day with my dad. So we went to the park, threw a frisbee around for a bit, he took a couple photographs, we looked at the exotic animals there (they had some fish tanks and reptiles and stuff) and that was pretty much it. It was a good birthday, though I can't seem to remember any other occasion where we had done anything remotely like that.
My uncle assures me that our father loved us more than anyone will ever know or understand and that he simply didn't know how to show it. So I'm adding that there to avoid sounding completely unfair. But let's just say that I had decided for myself that I have never learned what a good father is and that I didn't want my own kids to be miserable like that, someday. So no kids for me.
My no-kid is turning 12 this year. Long story. And for the most part, I was as shitty a father to him as my old man was to me. He wasn't exactly planned, we didn't get to talk much when I left the country and... like I said, long story. And when you have children, absolutely everybody you know, especially friends and relatives without children of their own, will tell you what you should do, what you're doing wrong, how you're not trying hard enough... fun times. The fun stuff I could tell you! But in spite of all the horrible, horrible things everyone had foreseen about us, we're perfectly cool with each other.
He emailed me about Mario 64 today. "L is real 2401". I remember playing that for the first time when I was in middle school and they had an N64 at a shop near school. Now he's my age and he's getting freaked by the exact same easter egg.
We're emailing back and forth talking about fun new hacks and modifications we're applying to Smash Bros., Mario 64, that kind of thing. And again, lots of people, especially those without children, tell me how "all those videogames are bad for him". It's not good for a kid to spend so much time in front of a computer, it's not good for them to spend more time playing games rather than hanging outside to do sports, yada, yada, yada.
He's 11 year old and writes his own ROM hacks. He doesn't just sit on his ass and plays games all day. He is figuring out how they work, what makes them function, what's happening behind all those fancy pixels and polygons. He's manipulating them.
So no, the fact that he spends a certain amount of hours per day altering and manipulating videogames is not fucking bad for him and you'd be a fucking idiot for telling him to stop and forcing him into a football team or some other crap he couldn't possibly give two shits about. My parents did that and what a fucking great idea that was! I'm still awful enough at football to join the English national team and I had lost endless amounts of time I could have spent figuring out how to create my own games. I have created a few games here and there many years ago, but in the end my knowledge was really just enough for me to become a games critic. Which is good, I'm not gonna knock it, but come on, fucking game design is where it's at! I'm still hoping to become well-known and popular enough in this lifetime to write and voice-act a character for at least one decent RPG at some point.
My kid is crazy about this stuff, he's talented and he should receive nothing but absolute support with this. Anyhow. Enough daddy-talk. I'm not dad-material, I can't quite process how I've become his role-model of all people and it feels so unreal talking to him about all those games, hacks, edits, easter eggs, the whole thing. I've done the exact same stuff when I was his age and I didn't really have anyone to talk to about these things, because people either didn't understand it or they thought it was weird. I want him to know that he's doing something really amazing and that he should keep it up, get into game design, do what he loves and make it his job, someday. That's how you win at life. And I don't mean to come across like one of those parents who live their dreams through their children. That's not it at all. But when I finished school I just sat there and had no idea who I was, what I wanted to be and my parents didn't know me or give a shit about any of my talents, so I had spent the next decade wasting my life in a call centre, various internships, a wholesale job training and god knows what else. I don't want the same shit happening to him.
In other news, I have just finished reviewing my fiscal year for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and... holy shit! During the first year of my self-eployment, my yearly income was less than what anyone with a good job would make in a month. I've looked through all my files and things got a little better every year. The other day I wrote about how we suddenly had much more money in the bank than we thought we'd have. Now I've checked how we fared this year and... wow. I don't think we'll be receiving working tax credit for much longer and I'm okay with that. Heck, if it wasn't for the state's support, then I never could have started my own business to begin with.
When I tried to become self-employed in Germany, they had me talk to a bunch of "experts", who would judge whether or not I'm even capable of being my own boss. And when I told them how little I'd earn during the first year, they freed me from taxes, but that's about all the help I got. When I moved to the UK, they paid me working tax credit. Basically, when you work full-time and you don't earn a certain minimum amount of money, the state will help you out a bit, which is insanely helpful. I mean, I just moved there from Germany, I had never worked in the UK for a single day, I never paid any taxes over there, I've never been a useful member of their society and they threw money at me. Thanks to working tax credit I now have my own business, a good job, things are getting better and better every year and I'm about to reach a point where I don't just earn enough to stop receiving tax credits, but I'll probably have to pay income tax. And I'm okay with that. How fucking cool is it that this country would support me and my shitty little business and help me get it off the ground? I didn't get that kind of help in Germany.
Just about a month ago, I was a really happy camper.
Me: "I'll be perfectly happy if things can just stay the way they are for a little while." My dad: *dies*
My computer: *explodes*
Great.
It's been several weeks now and I still don't know how to cope properly. Or how to "deal" with it. I don't know how to feel about the whole thing. Germany won the football world cup. And I can't talk about it with my dad. That's one of the few things we probably would have talked about. Divinity: Original Sin is a fantastic RPG, which combines elements from classics such as Baldur's Gate or Ultima VII and turns them into this amazing old-school game, which feels strangely fresh and modern at the same time. Everybody loves it, it's getting killer review scores and I'd love to hear what my dad thinks of that one. And I can't. Stupid.
Is that how you do it? Is that how you miss somebody properly? I cried like it was the worst moment in my life when my cat died. Actually, it still is one of the saddest moments I can remember. My old man... I dunno. Still doesn't seem real. It was incredibly difficult when we were out with Claire's family the other day, seeing as I'll never be out with my parents or grandparents again and the whole thing got a little too depressing, but it doesn't feel like I'm processing the whole thing right. I'm not processing anything. Maybe it's because I wasn't really expecting him to ever show up over here and I kind of just accepted the fact that I'd probably never see him again, anyway. I don't know. Is that how little I care about him? I don't know how I feel and I'm not sure I wanna dig and find out.
Also, my PC went out with a massive bang, so I had to replace the PSU. I know, what else is new, right? Went for a Corsair one this time, no Chinese knock-off. You get what you pay for. That's also when we realized that our financial situation had improved a whole lot. Ninja-style, without us actually noticing. During the first two or so year of our self-employment a successful month meant being able to pay the rent AND afford food that doesn't come out of a can. And we had plenty of months, where at least one of those criteria could not be met. And you adapt after a while. We only subscribe to a single MMO at a time, if any. We don't go out more than maybe once a month, if at all. We don't drink, smoke, go to the movies or hang out in clubs, go on vacation or spend money on anything that isn't food, bills or replacement hardware for something that blew up.
I have some friends, who believe we throw out unreasonable amounts of money on our exotic pet collection, but that doesn't actually cost us anything. You can eat a lot of steak if you own the cow factory. Of course our reptiles raise the power bills a lot, but that's about it and it's a hobby we're willing to pay for. Again - other people go out clubbing, drinking, watching movies, we keep a bunch of snakes and lizards. You get the idea.
We don't even wear clothes - just weapons.
So, the pixel-wide silver lining around our collection of shit-flavoured clouds was when we could actually cover all those expenses. I could afford a flight to the funeral, could afford the fucking funeral itself and when we checked the bank accounts to see whether or not we could replace my broken PSU, there was a nice moment of "how the fuck is there still money in here?"
I'm working full-time, every single day of the week, every weekend, never a day off, never a break. The publisher just started giving me more and more work and I was okay with it, because more work means more money. And then we just continued doing what we usually do. Stay at home, avoid wasting money, subscribe to 0-1 MMOs, lead humble little lives. At 3-4 times the income we're used to. We totally could have upgraded our computers. Or bought a massive LED-TV. Looks like we didn't even notice. Good!
It's gonna take a little while to refill our rainy day fund and we're gonna have to start putting more to the side for taxes, possible future explosions and funerals, but for the first time since we've started living together, we're not just able to afford our modest little way of life here. We're making extra - and lots of it. Putting that on the side sounds boring and mature and absolutely not like me. I should get a super powerful PC or a 60 inch telly to act as my new computer monitor and maybe a motorcycle, but when I really think about it, I don't even want any of that stuff. I just wanna keep doing my job, play my games, order the occasional pizza and hang around with Claire and our pets. I might not be overly ambitious, but I already have everything I want.
In other news, I gave TESO another try. It's... okay. I hated the game when it took support well over a month to restore my account after I got hacked. When I couldn't complete a ton of quests, because they were broken. And when level-ups slowed down to a pathetic crawl at the veteran ranks. I needed a break from it and I'm cool with TESO now, for the most part.
"Yeah, that looks safe! We should totally go check it out!"
Ironically, aside from the Quakecon announcements about the future of TESO, the two things which made me give it a second chance were World of Warcraft and Camelot Unchained. Confusing, I know.
As part of my job I have to check on WoW patch notes now and then, so I'm aware of the many class changes they're implementing with Warlords of Draenor. And as an arena veteran, I'm actually genuinely excited about some of these changes and I'll admit that part of me wants to play Warlords just for the arena. There are countless reasons why I don't ever want to go back to WoW, but I miss playing the arena with Claire and her sister. Happy days, we were a good team and I think we could make it really far if we cared enough and practiced a lot. Oh well.
Then there's Cameltoe Unchained, which promises that even a lowbie character can beat a veteran character one on one, if the lowbie player is talented enough. They promise large-scale pvp battles, destruction, mayhem and all that cool shit everyone wants to see in good pvp. Supposedly lag-free and at decent frame-rates, as well. And I'm so in the mood for that!
The thing is, whether you love or hate TESO, the game offers pretty much the best pvp you'll find in any MMO out there. You get the large-scale siege battles, huge fights at decent performance and the odd one on one situation, where you can kick another player's ass when you're good enough. That's what I came back for and I have to say, I still genuinely enjoy the pvp on there.
I joined a large zerg on there, helped capture several keeps and mow down hordes of enemy soldiers and at some point I got seperated from the group, got ambushed by some dumbass vampire player (I so hate vampires!), we fought it out, I kicked his ass and I was happy.
There are lots of players on TESO, who are a bit shit at what they do. I see public dungeons, where some players just sit and wait for somebody else to walk by and attack an enemy, because they're afraid to fight stuff on their own. I see people who die to harmless, regular baddies, because they don't really do much besides mashing the left mouse button. And I'm pretty good at TESO. I earn thousands telling people how to play. I write guides for money.
And honestly, running into some other player in pvp and being able to take them down because there is no cookie-cutter build, no alleged "rock-paper-scissors" system, where your class isn't supposed to beat certain other classes and where a fully maxed-out character can't just put on a ton of ridiculously overpowered gear and one-shot me regardless of personal skill or playstyle... it's pretty fucking great. Of course I can't jump in there on a level 20 toon and take on some guy on his maxed-out veteran character. But I haven't touched the game for three months, I've only just dipped into the low veteran ranks and beating that high level veteran vampire guy felt awesome. In most other MMOs that guy would have killed me in one or two hits because he was three times my veteran rank. Because levels. Because gear. Because some other stupid gameplay shit that makes items and levels infinitely more important than actual skill.
Veteran pve is still a bit... meh, really. They lowered the difficulty, because lots of people kept dying on the veteran levels and now you can just waltz into half a dozen enemies and slaughter them. On the plus side, you'll now level a lot faster, because stuff is easier to kill, you don't die to anything, everyone is happy. Well, except for those who enjoyed a challenge, but they can always do stupid shit like 12 player challenges in Craglorne, which are hysterically difficult and therefore being avoided by most people. Yay.
I think I'm gonna be playing this mostly for the pvp, because it's awesome and they'll add account-wide champion levels, which will basically work like paragon levels on Diablo 3. You know, just play any way you want and unlock a ton of passive bonuses to upgrade your character any way you want. I'm looking forward to that. Now if the game could stop stuttering, lagging and freezing for some inexplicable reason, then I might just make my peace with it and not feel tempted by Warlords of Draenor or Camelot Unchained...
The male brain is awesome. Walking down the street means you're scanning everyone around you Terminator-style. Well okay, you're not scanning them in order to steal their clothes like the popular Austrian robot, but you rate them. Females are categorized into would/would not bone and males into could/could not take in a fight. It's not a super scientific or even accurate process. According to my brain, I can take on just about the entire city of Nottingham and I'd fuck most of them, too. And yet we invented space travel! Go, brains! WOOOO!
It's 2014 and we still have those basic, barbaric urges to shag and to fight. I'm not sure how to feel about that. It seems a bit primitive and redundant nowadays, but it's that desire to compete, to show off your skills and to dominate those around you that made stuff like Street Fighter II so incredibly popular in school. Most of us couldn't access internet porn back then, so we weren't too tired to fight. Our desires for massive beating sessions were aimed at fictional characters like Ryu, Guile or Ken Masters rather than our own... well, you know.
Every day after school we'd all gather at one of the houses of kids who had Street Fighter II and beat the crap out of each other till our parents couldn't take it anymore. It was amazing - brought us together, too. Let's face it - kids are assholes. They'll bully each other for anything, whether you're fat or skinny or poor or you walk funny or what the hell ever. But when we met for competitive gaming, none of that really made any difference. There wasn't the fat kid. There was the kid who plays a really mean Blanka. There's was guy who beat arcade mode on hard. Street Fighter II became our escape from everyday life. On there we could be awesome, we'd be warriors, gladiators, heroes and villains and the next day in school we'd talk about the matches we had played and we all got along.
Well, until some of the more talented kids got really good at the game and everybody else got frustrated and gave up and the bullying started all over again, but it was fun while it lasted. Beat 'em ups quickly became one of my favourite things in life. I already told you about how kids paid just to watch me play King of Fighters at the arcade, how I met my first girlfriend there and all those old stories, so let's not get into that again. I was never great at sports, my parents never showed up when I did anything for school projects, but for a while, I was the fucking king of fighters and no one can take that away from me. It's a pretty epic memory.
A few years later we reached that weird age of gaming where absolutely every game had to be in fucking 3D. There was the Sony Playstation now and it could play fucking Tomb Raider, which looked even worse than it did on PC. Though of course back then we thought it looked pretty awesome. But yeah, 3D racing, 3D platforming and, of course, 3D fighting, meaning beat 'em ups, which looked like this...
had to make way for beat 'em ups looking like that...
Visuals improved a bit over time, but...
...yeah.
It's not like all of these games were horrible or anything. In fact, Virtua Fighter was pretty impressive, had an insane list of moves and neat animations. Aesthetically, however, these games were... OH COME ON, FUCKING LOOK AT THEM! Am I the only one who thinks 2D games looked WAY cooler back then?
I wanted to like them. I played them, gave them a fair chance. Battle Arena Toshinden, even brawlers like Fighting Force, but nothing moved inside my pants. Until my brother brought home a new disc, all black and shiny and inside a cracked casing, because most PSX game cases would shatter if you looked at them too hard... and the title on the manual read SOULBLADE. Depending on where you're from, the game was also known as Soul Edge, but who gives a shit? It was one of those yucky 3D fighters, but it had a pirate on the cover and a guy in bdsm gear and swords and... damn, that opening sequence gave me fucking goosebumps.
Completely retarded, nonsensical little song, but back then it got me so hyped up, the whole thing looked so incredibly cool, I just wanted to play. I still get goosebumps looking at that stuff today. And yes, it was about as ugly as all the other 3d fighters back in the day.
Wow, look at how young Mitsurugi still was in that one!
For some reason this game did it for me. It wasn't just another Eastern-style martial arts game, it wasn't over the top silly like Toshinden (which had Earthworm Jim in it, for fuck's sake!) or as hardcore as Bushido Blade. Just a bunch of characters and their katanas, nun-chucks, sai, katars, greatswords and so forth. Put two of them in an arena, only one of them walks out. You couldn't dismember enemies on there and it would take quite a few hits with your weapon of choice to "KO" (!) a foe, but sometimes realism shouldn't stand in the way of fun. The game was realistic enough where it counts. Not only were the battles and fighting-styles incredibly well-animated, but in the sequel, Soul Calibur on Sega's Dreamcast, you could watch little motion-captured sequences where each character showed off their respective style:
I know this can't really compete with any of the regurgitated crap we get from Activision, Ubisoft and EA every year now, but back in the day this was the shit. We'd all sit in the living room and instead of watching a dvd or actually playing the damn game, we sat there and watched some of these characters. It was like one of those Shaolin shows. Just ignore the cartoony textures, polygon count, lack of boob-physics and check out those animations. This is where 3d fighters could really shine!
As you might still recall, I've spent the last couple of weeks playing a heavily-modified Smash Bros. with Claire, which is another series of fighting games I genuinely enjoy. My favourite aspect of Smash Bros. is also my biggest gripe with the game: Every character has the exact same amount of special moves, they're all accessed the exact same way and you don't really "master" those moves. I'm not saying there is no learning curve or that there is absolutely no skill involved, but pulling off your character's unique moves and abilities is as simple as pushing one button along with the analog stick. Or just masturbate that C-stick and special attacks will squirt all over the place. Oooo baby!
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Smash Bros. is more about situational awareness, stage and item control, there are other factors at hand here which make this game in every way as tournament-worthy as Street Fighter or Soul Calibur. Heck, aren't they still playing the Gamecube version at EVO right the fuck now?
But sometimes I just want an epic duel. Just me and my enemy. No four player chaos, no pokemon summons, no UFOs or chain chomps. No way out, no cheap tricks. Draw your weapon and fight it out. And Soul Calibur is so great for that.
Yeah. I dug up the old Xbox, fired up Soul Calibur V and Claire and I have been at it all day and night. And we played some Soul Calibur, too (hurhur). We're about even when I pick a random character and she picks her favourite fighting style, though of course I do get the unfair advantage when I pick my character of choice, seeing as I've been practicing with that style since I was a teenager.
That said, Claire is good. Damn good. Talented, clever, a rapidly fast learner and we had some incredibly tough, close matches, which I had almost lost. Fortunately for me, she does tend to lose focus after a while and makes mistakes, but she'll probably destroy me once she figures out how to bring out her A-game and keep it out there for more than just a few moments. Not entirely sure whether she'll persevere and get better or whether she'll eventually give up, but she will beat me if she keeps on practicing. Which will be a little sad and embarassing and hopefully a one-off, but it'll also be incredibly sexy.
Meanwhile, my friend back in Germany from the old East vs West videos (Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XIII) is warming up his Xbox so we can duel a bit on there. So... there's a new East vs West video on the horizon. And since Claire is gonna fight him, as well... hmm... I dunno, maybe "The Beauty vs The Beast" or something. Put our friend in a nice dress, ask him to put on some makeup and then have Claire all angry and scary, baring her teeth, wild hair, that kinda thing. Might be a nice cover image for such a thing. I can't wait!
If you could unplug and power-off a human being for the sake of an operation, then "repairing" people probably wouldn't be all that different from repairing a machine, right? I mean, you open them up, try and fix what's broken, remove what shouldn't be in there or replace a piece with something better, close them back up and they should work just fine, assuming you've reattached everything the way it was. I had to do exactly that with our Nintendo Wii today.
It turns out that the Wii was designed by a bunch of assholes. See, I wanted to insert an SD card, it was dark, I didn't see what I was doing and since the dvd drive is less than a half inch away from the SD card slot, well...
Yes, yes, I put it in the wrong hole, fucking hilarious.
It's not the great analogy (anal, get it?) you might think it is, because the Wii doesn't just encourage you to use the wrong slot by accident through its anatomy - it sucks the foreign object right in. How's that, huh? I bet that never happened to you when you put it in the wrong hole. Yeah, didn't think so.
"How would that even work?"
See, you don't just push a little button and a little tray comes sliding out. The drive detects that you're putting something in there and it eagerly gobbles it up, not giving a shit whether it's a dvd or your SD card, a penny or some shit. If you do a google search on foreign objects inside a Wii's dvd drive, well... let's just say it's a pretty damn common problem.
So, if your Wii ever decides to eat something that isn't a dvd, you're gonna have to open her up. Remove a ton of stickers and rubber feet, unplug some power and data cables, reach all the way inside (which also requires a set of special Y-shaped screwdrivers), remove all the screws that keep the damn dvd drive together, remove whatever the fuck is stuck inside and then put the whole damn thing back together. Hurray!
Thing is, our SD card wasn't just bought to be used with the Wii. We usually put it in the camera. And the one day I couldn't use the damn camera, sans SD card and everything, is when our monitor lizard has learned a new trick. If you drag the laces of his favourite shoe across the floor he'll go and chase after them like a cat, eventually jump and bite them and then play tug of war with you like a dog. The amazing thing is how he does a whole 360 degree spin whilst tugging on the damn things. You know, like an alligator, twisting a chunk of meat out of some fresh kill. It's incredibly cool and really fun to watch and I'd be sharing a video of it right now, if... well, you know. I finally got the damn SD card out of the Wii after taking it apart bit by bit (AND the damn Wii still works after I put it back together!), but now Hugo is tired from all the fun we had yesterday, so he's not even coming out of his tank. Meh.
So, why the fuck would I even want to be anywhere near a Wii with my SD card? Well...
Yes, that's Ronald McDonald, Boba Fett and Colonel Sanders. And one of the many reasons why most of us no longer give a shit about Sega, but cmon, does this make you want to play Smash Bros. or what?
Disturbingly sexy Birdo creeps me out more than Michael Jackson.
A bunch of people have tweaked and edited Smash Bros. Brawl a bit to make it play and feel more like Smash Bros. Melee. And that seemed kind of fun, so I wanted to give it a try and since I was already hacking the Wii and modifying games, I figured - hey, adding a couple new characters, songs and maps can't hurt, right?
Sephiroth / Iron Man - sounds like horrible, awful fan-fiction and now it's in a video game. Yay!
All the characters still use move-sets and abilities from existing avatars, so the whole thing is just as playable and balanced as regular Smash Bros. You just get a little more variety.
And Leonardo beating the crap out of Batman is something everyone wants to see.
I don't think I'm ever gonna need another beat 'em up. Sure, there's stuff like Mugen, which lets you put literally anyone or anything inside a fighting game, but who wants to spend all day memorizing complicated special attacks when you can just mash your way to victory on Smash Bros.?
Batman fighting a cow inside a level from Sonic 2. My life is complete.
Aaaaand... those guys, I guess.
This isn't some shitty texture replacer like the stuff people managed to squeeze in there a few years ago. There are some pretty amazing stages and models out there. And if I can choose between Batman and Pacman, well... sorry, no Wii U for me.
Claire and I are cautiously poking and tugging at Pathfinder, gently tearing little cracks and holes into the surface which is the starter campaign to see what lurks beneath. Claire is tempted to introduce a friend or perhaps family to the whole thing. But seeing as she is a complete neophyte to all things tabletop, I first had to ease her into it, see how she likes it, show her how it all works - she found the concept entirely unappealing at first. Now she suggested a play session with friends via Skype, so that's a bit of a change of heart. Good!
She's playing a Tengu, which means in that particular setting, that she's not an obese Asian man with a long-nosed red mask, but a birdman. Um, lady. Here's an interpretation by the fine artist SketchyMcDrawpants:
And like that bird in the picture, her Tengu is a bit on the sneaky side, aspiring to become a Shadow Dancer. Flying raven ninja people - why didn't they milk that in any modern MMORPG yet? And while she's great at backstabbing, lockpicking, detecting hidden stuff and all those things that make every dungeon group want a rogue (remember when they were just "thieves"?), she'd fail to sneak up on Stevie Wonder with an ear infection. Holy shit.
It's hilarious. Backstab the shit out of a dragon? Been there, done that. Casually figure out ancient Elven rune puzzles whilst walking past them? Piece of cake for this bird. But she's blessed with the grace of a hippo. Which is pregnant. With quintuplets. Scouting ahead to spy on the goblin king and his soldiers to see what they're up to was probably a good idea. Tripping over one's own pants, tearing down an old tapestry in the fall, throwing said tapestry into a lit brazier to set the whole place on fire, then crashing the brazier into a table, which sends a dagger, that had been resting on said table, flying through the air and straight into the goblin king's left eye, however, is generally considered a bad move.
Those goblins could have been our friends. They could have told us how to beat that giant monster at the end of the dungeon. But rushing in to help an inexperienced rogue, who just committed what must have looked like the world's most complicated and embarassing assassination attempt is cool, too. Besides, everyone appreciates a bit of Rube Goldberg. We're gonna have to get ourselves a new printer for those character sheets (writing that shit down by hand or checking on the screen every five minutes is a pain in the ass) and an extra player or two, but man, that whole thing was fucking hilarious. We had fun.
Oh hey, funeral last weekend and all that, a chance to bump into family and... well, I had the chance to spend an interesting day with Kitten Jr. The kid is 11 years old now and lives like any regular 11 year olds, meaning he's got two computers (one of which runs Vista, which he fucking hates - good boy!), a rather respectable collection of retro consoles and just about everything Nintendo you could possibly imagine, a giant Yoshi and a cat, which provides him with a steady supply of decapitated birds.
He spends most of his days hacking his Wii games and old N64 roms. So, if you want to have Mewtwo and Dr. Mario fight Metalsonic in a stage from Paper Mario on Smash Bros. Brawl, he's got you covered. I'm tempted to get a new SD card for our Wii to do the same thing, because some of that shit was pretty fucking amazing. If you're unfamiliar with Project M, check this out:
Just looking at that makes me want to play Smash Bros. We've also played Mario 64 in two player co-op mode. Not that shitty old hack where player two is a black Mario - there's an actual Luigi model in there now. And if you're sick and tired of the same old Mario 64 levels, there's always Super Mario Star Road.
What's really amazing is how my son's school supports all of this. When I was his age, my teachers wouldn't give a shit. "Here's a jigsaw and some wood, go make a puzzle" that's the kind of school projects we had. My son is running a game design project in school. He's in sixth grade and most kids taking part in this course are tenth-graders, so there's that. He's currently experimenting with Mode 7 emulation.
Look, I hate nothing more than annoying parents, who always talk about how oh-so fucking great their kids are, because, let's face it - most kids are fucking stupid. And parents are biased, because of course they fucking are. So lemme just say that I've been sitting in a room with an eleven year old, each of us typing away at a laptop, talking about mode 7, rom extenders, sprite hacks, move sets and how to apply those damn animations to Jigglypuff's skeleton, who is the most annoying and useless addition to Smash Bros., ever.
Solid Snake and Pacman are retarded additions to the whole thing, Twilight Princess is superior to Ocarina in almost every single aspect and Wind Waker is one of the best animal cruelty simulators on the Cube. You get the idea.
So hey, if you happen to bone every once in a while and you're not totally disgusted by the idea of keeping your very own kid as a direct result of all the plowing you do, try to get them into something cool. I always thought kids were into stupid crap like Yugi Oh and One Direction or whatever the fuck is popular at the moment, but if you expose them to video games at an early age, they can grow up to be pretty fun. Look, I'm not the kind of dad who will drag you to the park and throw a frisbee at you, because fuck that shit. But coop some Mario 64 or destroy each other's faces in Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros.? Damn, I should have looked into growing a child much sooner!
And hey - he's into game design and I'm a writer. I like where this is going. :D
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