What are you thankful for?

Me? lots of stuff but mostly the fact that The Walking Dead episode five was released yesterday, gotta go!

L4D2 and NS2

After winning the tourney at UAH and noticing there was a free week for L4D2 I decided to play some random matches to see how things were after not playing for a year excluding my time in the tourney. There have been no changes to gameplay what so ever and I see people still leave as soon as a match starts to go south for them. I feel like this game really would have benefited from a system that rewards seeing a match to the end and punishes leavers such as League of Legends does. Playing in the L4D2 tourney was the most fun I had playing since the game's release.

Now onto the main attraction.

Natural Selection 2 is a tactical shooter pitting the alien Khara versus the human Frontiersmen. a tactical shooter is one in which one player must sit in the hot seat and command all the other players from a RTS view to give orders and setup buildings to build. This game is interesting due to the fact that it's not just one team with guns vs another team with guns, the Khara must use stealth and deception due to the fact that a majority of their team must fight at melee range with teeth and claws. This post isn't here to describe the gameplay in detail, only to say THIS GAME IS AWESOME AND YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GET IT.

Here's a video.

Of course, most people who are interested in this game would have seen this video by now, hopefully I'll see you in game sometime!

Happy birthday to me! (and my twin)

Today marks my 23rd birthday, hopefully I'll have some time tomorrow to post about something such as L4D2 or NS2, goodnight everyone!

Sweaty 'n' Ready makes its debut at ChargerCon and brings home 1st place.

Sweaty 'n' Ready joined the 2012 fall ChargerCon tournament and brought home first place after facing off against team Awesome in the first around and then finally against team Ramrod in the finals. Each team Sweaty 'n' Ready member won a $25 dollar gift card from Walmart.

Thank you Awesome and Ramrod for showing up!

You can find our steam group here. If things work out hopefully we will be taking part in more tournaments!

FTL and a new Valve title.

Earlier this week I managed to complete FTL on hard mode, was quite an experience. But what does FTL have to do with rumors about a new Valve title? Instead of trying to paraphrase and steal the work of another site I'll link to it directly.

Space

Could Valve be looking to move in on the space mmo market? Who knows! What I do know is that I'm quite excited for this and can't wait to hear more. While GamingBolt says that this only a rumor, I doubt it's anything less than Valve's next big game judging by all the work you can see being put into it from the concept art.

Babel Rising and War of the Roses

I managed to get past the level I was having trouble with the day after I made my last post. To keep things short so I can move on to my next topic I will describe the next three levels as short as possible: tedious, repetitive, boring, and uninstalled.

Next.

War of the Roses is a medieval war game published by the same people who brought you Mount and Blade. The game is basically a copy of the multiplayer gameplay from Mount and Blade ported over into a new engine as a stand alone game. The game has also taken a note from the Call of Duty franchise, the select and create class menus look like they have been freshly ripped from Modern Warfare. The game boasts two modes, conquest and team deathmatch. Team deathmatch is self explanatory for anyone familiar with online video games. For those not familiar, Team deathmatch pits two teams against each other and the first to reach a preset number of kills is the winner. Conquest is also simple, each map has an odd number of points to capture, holding more points than the enemy team fills your meter, hold points and fill your side of the bar to win the match.

There are about five classes to play as and three custom slots to make your own classes with. Custom classes are the core of this game since you can easily make a custom class that would wipe the floor with any of the five default classes. Arrows and bolts regenerate over time so archers never have to worry about running out of ammo for too long. melee is still a game of picking your swing direction and block direction. There is about seven maps to play on.

I would love to make a recording of myself playing the game, unfortunately my computer can just barely run the game as is. However it DOES run it smoothly enough to play so I am one happy camper. My video card is an old Nvidia 8800 GT and the minimum recommended by the game is Nvidia GeForce 9800/AMD Radeon 4830 My CPU is an E4600 2.40Ghz and the second core is overclocked to 3.20Ghz. Of course, I would never recommend buying a game if you do not meet the minimum requirements, even if the game has been running smoothly for me does not mean you will get the same results, good luck!

A tip before I go, Press V to flip down the visor on your helmet to protect your face, yes this matters in the game as attacks do damage based on where they hit, even your face.

Aim for the jugular.

Babel Rising

I was looking at this title so I thought I would give it a try, and if you haven't guessed it already this post is to share with everyone what I thought of it based on what I have played so far, which I believe was around level six.

This game has you prevent workers from building a tower in an attempt to reach the heavens, a game based on a story most people have heard about already. You can choose two from four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water to stop the workers from building or maybe even deal damage to the tower. You can use spells anytime you want, but waiting until they are fully charged will cause more damage.

Unfortunately, while the game seems to have been made for the casual player in mind, the game is unforgiving. Casting spells before they are fully charged does very little, and even fully charged spells hardly do any damage to the tower that a single worker cant fix. While this did not bother me much since the objective isn't usually to STOP them from building it, only to meet some sort of objective before they can finish, let me share with you what caused me to quit the game (for now). Around level six, you are tasked with destroying around 72 ships that are attempting to deliver stones for the construction of the tower. These ships come in waves of four, with about 12 ships on each wave (eight on the first one). The problem was that waves two and after sometimes spawned ships almost right next to the harbor they needed to reach to be safe, allowing the ships to almost instantly get to the harbor safely while you miss with your shot that takes a moment to travel to the target while you try to stop the other 11 ships in the wave.

Now there is difficulty and there is bullshit difficulty. The former is the kind that gives you a challenge that you can get through with knowledge, skill, and a little bit of practice, the latter is the kind that lets the game dish out a cheap shot and forces you to replay the level in order to make the game seem longer than it really is. While missing a ship or two does not fail the level right away, the ever increasing wave of workers do not allow for failure, and typically if you do not kill all the ships the first time they appear you will not have the chance to see the extra wave.

Overall, I am a bit disappointed with this purchase for reasons stated and not stated. I may intend on taking another look at this game and if I do, I will make another post about it. Until then, my next post may be about the spaceship roguelike game FTL.

Employment

I have found a job as a waiter in the cafe of a hotel so I may be updating infrequently until things settle. This job has been off to a rocky start and I hope things will improve soon.

Guild Wars 2

I bought Guild Wars 2 earlier and I'm loving it! I'm already level 33 after about three days. I will make a longer post about it sometime at the end of this week. I did not look much into making a post about Firefall as I never got around to seeing if it has an NDA or not.

Firefall

Good news everyone! I have been invited to the Firefall closed beta! I'll have to take a look at the rules to see if can actually blog about it though but I'm sure its okay to mention I'm in the beta at least. Hopefully I'll be able to make a post about it.

Game Booster from Iobit

I heard about this nifty little program that could increase your performance while playing games by safely stopping unnecessary processes and windows services called Game Booster. I was having a bit of trouble trying to run Diablo 3 in one monitor and watching a live stream on the other so I decided to give this program a shot to see if I could get the FPS stuttering to stop.

Right on the linked web page you can see Iobit offers a one click boost in performance, though anyone should know that you should at least take a look at what the settings are before you dive right in with a computer program that will modify other running processes.

The higher the green bar for each process the more recommended it is to select it so that the program will close it along with a submit for review button next to each bar, not shown are more processes and services to close down below.

Game Booster also offers a game box to launch all your games from and save your settings for boosting each one, should you save custom settings for them. Unfortunately it seems that Game Booster cannot tell which games are still installed and which items are just left over files from previous games that were uninstalled as I can spot quiet a few games on that list that I am sure are no longer installed.

Also offered: tweaks of varying degrees, defragmentation for your game files, and driver updates.

Of course, the boost results shown after boosting. Not shown, the varying temperatures of your cpu, gpu, and HD along the bottom of the window which have disappeared for some strange reason the day after I installed the program.

To enable the boost you can either manually enable it or launch a game from the game box. Launching the game from the box will also enable the game desktop, which is just the same as the usual desktop but with everything else hidden from sight, including your desktop shortcuts in order to cut down on distractions from the game.

Does it work? was I able to smite demons AND watch live entertainment at my leisure? The answer is a big "KINDA"

Until I test this with some other games (such as Smite) I wont be able to see its full potential, but I did notice some decrease in stuttering and was able to play a bit better while having the stream open. What really helped with the program however was the temperature warning which I mentioned is missing now. I had noticed my GPU hit a peak of 92C which may not exactly be burn your house down Nvidia temperatures, but not something my old 8800 GT could handle (as shown by the soon to follow crash when getting up past the 90C mark on Diablo 3). Thankfully during this I had been running everything on high so all I had to do was turn things down to low, now my card hardly gets above 80C.

For my next post, perhaps I will talk about making money with the auction house on Diablo 3.

Smite

Hello! It's been a while since I updated. In my last post I mentioned that I would talk about some of the games I got from the steam sale but it has been too long since then so I may or may not still do that.

Smite is moba that plays similarly to other games in the genre but is set in the third person view similar to Monday Night Combat. Unlike MNC the game has items to buy and single but much larger map to play on. Smite plays like your more typical moba such as DotA rather than MNC's close quarters combat. You can buy both items AND abilities (abilities similar to summoner spells in LoL). Of course being a moba, your entertainment entirely depends on the players you get matched with on your team. The game it self is free, but it costs game points or real money to purchase new gods with each costing around four dollars. The game is currently in closed beta but its easy to get keys, in fact I might be able to give some out! Leave your email address in comments or contact me directly. Making a purchase in the Smite store will also give you access to the game, in case I am unable to give out anymore keys. Hope to see you soon!

Total Recall

Saw it tonight, was a very good movie, not going to try and compare it to the original movie due to the fact that I haven't seen it. I liked what they did with "the fall" and their ideas on memories.

Tera: gonna just wrap this up in one post

It's been what, two weeks and a half since my last post? I'm going to just post everything here in order to make sure most of this still is still relevant.

Combat is simply the greatest thing and maybe one of the few saving graces that make this game stand out. No tab targeting, everything is real time (depending on your internet connection) and all attacks and spells must be targeted. I personally find this kind of combat really engaging and is the sole reason I recommend most people interested in MMOs at leave give Tera a try despite the fact that it is lacking in other areas. My only complaint I can immediately think of is that lock on abilities can be a be iffy when trying to lock onto a target such as heals or curses.

Forming groups is simple as it is in most other games of this genre, so I will exclude information about HOW to form groups along with party UI as that too is familiar.

There are some spells that can only function or have any use while in a party such as summon (teleport party members to your location), due to my only playing as a priest up to level sixty I cannot make a list of them though based on the fact that there were so few party only moves for priest I would be there would be few for other classes as well.

Some spells have extra side abilities or benefits for your allies, such as the ability for a lancer's shield to reduce the damage anyone behind you takes when you ready it (having not played a lancer, I do not know the name of this ability) is one example.

Dungeon fights can be interesting in Tera, though unfortunately the dungeons themselves are often linear and uninteresting for the most part, had I those pictures I took this would be the space I would use them for.

Party makeup for dungeons still follows the holy triad: tank, healer, and DPS.

Keeping aggro in control in this game seems a bit different, as monsters seem to bounce around often between players in certain fights (and with there being no mods to track such numbers readily available). Often times I tried to avoid using my larger target heals over my AoE heals due to the fact that they seems to draw plenty of aggression despite the fact that I had a bonus on my armor to reduce it. Healers or any player with a resurrect scroll can also bring back dead players while still in combat, though the act of doing so has a long cast time (more so with the scroll).

The boss fights themselves vary from boss to boss on how interesting they are, though a common trend I noticed that bosses that are not the final boss in the dungeon are not guarantied to drop interesting loot or any loot at all despite how difficult the encounter was.

As for PvP, I feel as though En-mass really dropped the ball here, since there is no cast time to mount, ganking on the world map results in a game of cat and mouse unless the person you got the jump on decides to sit still or you get lucky with a string of knockdowns. Last I played there was also no PvP battleground to speak of. Needless to say, PvP in Tera was completely lacking.

GvG and vanarchy, one of the selling points for Tera is also underwhelming. The guild I joined was one of the first vanarchs, unfortunately anyone who wasn't the guild leader soon realized that being a a member of a vanarch guild meant jack shit other than having a fancy horse that could move slightly faster than others available. Judging by the fact that everyone complained that none of the vanarchs did anything interesting I believe it's safe to say there isn't much to do as a vanarch in the first place.

If I think of anything else I'll make another post for it, this should be the last big post about Tera. Next I'll talk about some of the games I got from the steam sale.

The Dark Knight Rises

Saw the movie tonight, excellent movie, only a few things here and there bothered me about the movie but talking about them would be spoilers.

Steam summer sale

It's happening! A new feature we see tonight are the flash deals, lasting four hours long these deals are for the vigilant who check the store page multiple times in a day. Have fun!

Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention you can also vote for the games going on sale for the next day!

Tera: Enchanting

Well folks, it looks like the developers of Tera have a scorched earth policy regarding uninstalling their game, as it looks like the uninstall took the screenshots along with it. At least the lack of pictures means that these posts will take up less space.

To describe enchanting in Tera in a few words would be: "Unrewarding and Frustrating"

But first, an explanation of what you get when you enchant an item.

Not all items are enchantable, but most if not all can be used as a ingredient for enchanting. Those that can be enchanted will have three different bonuses, which are randomly generated, that are unlocked as you enchant the item up every three levels. For each level, the item's attack and impact increase (but not its other bonuses such as mana and healing power).

To enchant an item you need: the item you are enchanting, an item of the same type (chest piece for a chest piece, gloves for gloves, weapon for a weapon, the items do not need to share a name and the weapons do not have to be the same (bow for a staff works) and nor do the items need to be the same quality) and some enchanting powder depending on what the enchant level of the item is. Once you have everything you simply begin your enchanting and CROSS YOUR FINGERS AND CROSS THEM GOOD, why?

Because here comes those two words "Unrewarding and Frustrating".

Unrewarding: whats so unrewarding about getting a bonus such as extra attack, faster run speed on your boots, or reducing your aggro from boss monsters? Taking only into consideration the rewards you receive and not what it took to get them, it does seem very rewarding. However, it takes absurd amounts of time, money, and resources to enchant an item the higher you get its enchanting level up. Every time you fail to enchant you only get back the items you were trying to enchant, the item and the powder you were using are lost to the void. the second tier of powder is nearly twenty gold, of which you need an amount matching the tier of the item. Tier 12 items would then take 240 gold EACH ATTEMPT PLUS a item to be sacrificed. this may not seem much but as a person who has sat down to waste two thousand gold to the RNG in one sitting just to get an item up from +6 to +7 (without success) I can tell you that one soon looks upon the enchanting system as something you want to avoid putting much hope in. For those who do not play Tera, two thousand gold is not normally acquired in a day much less two or three depending on what level you are.

I think with those words I also covered "Frustrating" if I do say so my self though I will say a few more on the subject. The success rate for enchantment decreases dramatically as you increase an item's enchant level. Having to sacrifice such a huge amount of time and money is a real letdown knowing that there is no guarantee that you will get anything out of it. I for one would much rather pay a high cost with a guaranteed chance of getting something in return rather than sacrifice a lamb to the RNG.

Next week: combat in Tera and maybe dungeon crawling with party mechanics.

See ya!

Hello

Alright, haven't been posting in a while due to the abundance of PARTY TIME with my grandmother being away. I've decided to make a point of posting on Sundays in order to give this some sort of a schedule. Following this post, I'll finally talk about enchanting in Tera, hopefully uninstalling Tera hasn't removed all those screenshots I took.

Edit: "uh oh"

Still havent posted.

Hell, I might as well save it all for after my subscription runs out, see you then!

Tera: level up

Hit level 59 in Tera, will make two posts tomorrow.

Reached 58 and a 1/3rd, will make a post about instancing tomorrow, or maybe enchanting.

May not have time for a long post today, will keep grinding though.

Tera: Level up!

57 GET, that's all to report, more posts tomorrow. I guess that "late" post will be today's post.

Dawn of the first day, 144 hours remain. (Late)

    This post is a bit late, but better late than never.

To start this off, let's look at what characters we have going into this.

   

From left to right

Hiri: Elin Priest, level 55

Gorillalotion: Baraka Mystic, level 25 (belonging to my brother)

Zerkave: Castanic Sorcerer, level 8

I started this game going into it as a healer, as learning from my experiences as a mage in World of Warcraft that NO ONE cares about a dps, hoping that it would be easier to find groups to do anything.

            I picked an Elin mainly for her racial abilities, mostly being able to avoid aggro from monsters along with running and swimming faster.

                                                                          Just kidding!

On to my first point, questing and solo combat versus monsters, I’ll be doing most of the talking with pictures here.

Zoom in if you need to.

Quests are still, go to X and kill Y of Z, collect X of Y, or talk to Y. Not much changes here from your standard MMO.

Combat however is a bit more involved when it comes to solo PVE.

A normal enemy preparing for an aoe attack.

Almost all of your skills need to be aimed in this game, gone are the days of tab targeting your opponents. From healing to doing damage, you need to keep your cursor on your foe (or friend for the healers) if you want to come out ahead. Fighting monsters in Tera can be its own challenge, though not a hard one if this you have previous experience in other games. Almost monsters telegraph their attacks ahead of time. Eyes suddenly glow red? get ready to dodge! Big monster flexing its muscles getting ready for a big sweeping attack? get that backflip ready! but more details on combat in another post.



Anyone who has played an MMO knows how questing goes, do the surrounding quests and go to the next town, Tera does not differ here. Though in Tera it seems that EVERYTHING will give you EXP, from mining and gathering to questing to killing random enemies.

Though if that doesn't suit you, you can level up off of the little animals wandering the terrain.

If you follow the story quest, denoted by the red title text, you will be taken to some new areas such as underground mines being used as a prison for an elder (but somewhat friendly) god complete with his own cinematic introduction (if you complete the story quest).

But I won’t... let the audio keep in sync with the video!

The story quest is chock full of cinematic parts, (all of which have trouble keeping the audio and video in sync). Even giving you cinematics during instances when you complete your related story quest, MUCH to the dismay of your hyperactive party members who don’t bother checking to see if the healer is ready (despite the giant PLAYER IN CINEMATIC icon over his head). After the cinematic ends, you even get to talk to the big god himself and receive your orders from him.

Hey, were those YOUR balls I passed under on the way up here?

Who of course, gives you a quest to go into an instance (to, you know, prove your worth). After taking I queued for an instance while clearing out the rest of the quests in the area.

You thought I was kidding didn’t you.

My queue eventually triggered and I was invited into an instance, though not the one the god gave me a quest for. I will make another post about my adventures into instances and group questing.

So long!

Tera: Another day another level.

Kept with my quota of getting a level a day (now 56) and already 1/4 of the way into the next level, will post more on certain subjects such as enchanting, dungeon running, and guilds hopefully tomorrow.

Happy birthday Nano!

This post goes out to my great grandmother Alice, Whom I have nick named "Nano" ever since I was young, she turns 95 today! Happy birthday Nano!

Reviewing Tera

I have been playing Tera since the last closed beta up to today and starting from today I will be reviewing my time spent until I quit the game. My subscription renewal is on the 29th and I do not intend on renewing so I decided I would spend these last six days writing about my last day to day experiences to share it with others. I'll be starting this off as a level 55 Elin priest named Hiri, feel free to join me (should you somehow read this article while its still current and I'm still playing). five levels, six days, hopefully I'll get to the maximum level before quitting and get to experience some end game content. With my next post, I'll also give some thoughts on what I liked and disliked about the game. Its going on for 5 AM now and I can see the sun rising through the cracks in my blinds, I best get some sleep, goodnight.

IT BEGINS!

Hello! It's nearly 4 AM here and I am just starting my blog (after months ago when I first said I was going to). As implied, I'll be talking about video games most of the time, computer related items, and very rarely anime. I will be sharing my opinions on video games and maybe even review some in greater detail along with anime, my posts on other computer related items will be more opinion rather than review. I primarily play only computer games, as I lack a PS3 and lack any interest in most titles for the Xbox 360 (that and the one we have breaks more often than not).

I intend on following up this post with a post about my experiences with Tera very soon.