March 2007 Entries
I've not talked about my recent season in EVE Online much, and while this is partly oversight on my part, it is also part reluctance too. In general, my online adventures are anonymous things, mostly because of personal paranoia. I don't put character names on the blog so that I don't get mobbed by crowds of autograph seeking fans while chasing goblins about, you see! Haha...I kill myself. But, and this is the important thing, in most of my online games, I am the only one that can do so.
EVE is a bit different though in that it's the...
Tadaa! Something like a year after getting started, and while everyone else is digging into the Nightfall campaign of Guild Wars, talking up the forthcoming Viking-based expansion of Guild Wars, and talking down the furthercoming World of Warcraft based 'Guild Wars 2', I've finally finished the original Prophecies campaign. Woot!
It was supposed to be Tuseday N00b Club, but we had a prior cancellation, leaving the two of us unable to continue in Istan (due to The Pact), so we logged back across to our 'mains', in so much as the term has meaning there at all, my R/N with Beastmastery...
Some days later than advertised, the Advanced Combat Engineering toys are finally here in Planetside. I was particularly enthusiastic about these, as to be honest, I'm not terribly good at pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger in a manner that results in someone other than me getting shot to death. Mine-laying on the other hand...now you're talking!
I'm also quite conscientious about keeping our teams vehicles and base turrets in a good state of repair, although mostly this has been a rather dogged exercise, mostly with the aim of stopping the base using up all it's NTU trying...
A somewhat short Tuesday N00b Club this week, beset mostly by Technical Difficulties of the ISP kind, with two of us having connectivity troubles that pretty much ruined the evening, causing a great deal of waiting around and frustration.
It's such a delicate thing really, such a precarious existence, and one I've come to take for granted a bit, I think. Being able to sit down, connect, log in and carry out my affairs in any one of a dozen escapist fantasies, and a dozen alternate lives. Granted, a slightly alarming number of these tend to involve being told by one...
Swings and roundabouts. Last weeks supremacy in the two-player EVE CCG bouts turned into quite a different story this week, and as I fear, the introduction once more of the third fleet caused a great deal of difficulty for my predominantly early-zerg Minmatar strike force.
It was Caldari and Amaar opponents this time, and I'm quickly seeing that having two different decks, or at least a swap in and out 'sidedeck', a sub-set of extra cards, purely aimed at beefing my little throwaway single-enemy deathsquad up a bit, might allow it to hold it's own once the larger fleets of my...
More good omens, and gathering momentum for what I hope will be an almighty High Fantasy RPG Backlash some time soon, along with subsequent Renaissance, with a fascinating GDC interview over at Virgin Worlds, with the chaps behind the upcoming Stargate: Worlds MMO, in production and possibly due out this year:
Virgin Worlds: Podcast #60
Must admit, I'm quite keen on the idea of a Stargate MMO, as it does rather seem to be the kind of idea that can't go wrong. If it's good, it's good, and if it's awful, in all the ways we all know only too well, it's...
The Mehtani Keys area of GuildWars: Nightfall is quite possibly one of the best looking zones in an MMO I've seen in a very long time. The Tuesday N00b Club spent a fair amount of time there this week, what with our ongoing mission to root out and destroy a sudden appearance of mystery undead in the lands of the Istani.
It's a large area of very shallow seas, knee-deep in most places, studded with gloriously sun-drenched sandy atolls, topped with light tropical vegetation. Rope bridges connect some of the isles together, and simple fishemen occupy a idyllic village on tall...
Some decent EVE CCG action last night, with my much revised Minatar deck. One opponent, playing Caldari, and I managed to consistently have the upper hand for most of the quick-fire two-player games we got through. I think I'm getting there with the deck design stuff; 52 cards this time, most of which were small, quick and cheap Frigates, allowing me to get a usefully high throughput of assaulting ship pretty much from the word go.
This does rather seem to be the winning strategy in general as far as I can tell, and does make me wonder why the bigger...
Quite getting back into EVE Online again, representing as it does, an MMO that does things a bit differently, which is the sort of game I'm increasingly drawn to these days. I've auto-attacked a lot of monsters in my day, and after a while, one 'Miscellaneous "Cause Damage" Special Attack #43' hot key button starts to look much like any other, and only the particle effects start to vary. EVE Online, as I've mentioned often in the past, during my previous seasons in there, presents an entirely different game mechanic on a very moment-to-moment level, throughout play, based more in...
It's GDC time, and in the light of the now defunct E3 show, this seems to be becoming one of the high-points of our calendar. I have a sort of indifferent view on the big Preview Shows as a whole, although GDC seems to serves a somewhat greater purpose, in that it's largely about keynote speeches, workshops and all that kind of thing, where developers are the main audience, rather than the reputed bearpit of the nakedly commercial E3, which is, or rather was, more for marketing people than anything else.
Anyway, for proper coverage of the thing, do check out...
In perhaps less time than I thought, I caved in and resubbed to one of my long time online antagonists, EVE Online, demonstrating once again my embarrassing lack of willpower. Personally, I hold the EVE CCG and Eve Tribune (links to the right) responsible in equal measure, but then a return to a, hopefully, more engaging EVE experience than I'm used to from past visits, was always something I'd been planning on having a go at this year anyway.
Of course, EVE is the game you don't have to play, to play, and prior to cancelling in the usual distemper last...
Last night's card card game was something of a lesson in the importance of knowing how probability works, I think. Being the veteran pro of the EVE CCG that I now am, I'm attempting to remove the training wheels a bit, and instead of having someone else who knows what they're doing build the deck for me (i.e. Using the prepackaged Starter Decks), I'm having a go at putting one together myself.
This could have gone better, and even before we started playing, I knew I'd done something terribly wrong. My deck was much bigger than everyone else's, largely because I...
Ah, now here's some news I can get a little hyperactive about:
Gamespot: THQ Forging Warhammer 40K MMOG
(via MMODIG)
Looks like the already tried and tested partnership between THQ and Games Workshop, which brought us Dawn of War, and Fire Warrior are going to have a crack at the big one, an MMO based on, in or around, the sprawling grim darkness of the future that is Warhammer 40K. The Unbeliever is excited, and damnit, so am I, in spite of the carefully constructed veneer of jaded indifference I maintain to appear cool online!
I'm certainly interested in the much more complete and...