June 2007 Entries
Some trepidation ahead of this week's Guild Wars: Nightfall session, given the rather nightmarish difficulties we had with the various crack Margonite assault squads were were encountering in both mission, and overland areas, but overall, the session went very well, which seems to be setting a bit of a pattern for these weekly outings; one week we'll be magnificent conquering heroes, and the next we'll be kicked up and down the continent like mistreated puppies.
This week turned out to be one of the decent trips, mostly to a great deal of post-mortem, research, adaptation and a lengthy meeting...
Enough of the RP nonsense, and back to the rumination! Spent most of this weekend getting the most out of my 14 day free trial of Auto Assault, which is turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm about level 30 now, which is a bit alarming in itself, and I'm now zooming about Cinderfall, which is a large crater filled with crumbling shanty towns, rotting tower blocks, rivers of green goo, and to the north, a fantastically imagined and designed region dominated by a mad AI, all in right angles, red lights and black robots, with some excellent...
Always, The Road... The Mutants probably see it as a vein, or an artery, granting it a mystical, ritual significance, mumbling mantras in their festering contamination-riddled huts, worshiping it, praying to it's 'spirit' for protection and aid. For the Betrayers, it is more likely a legacy, a sentimental symbol of a carefree and decadent past, of a time before the contamination and the atomic fires, a time when it was perhaps permissible to be weak, and soft. I see it quite differently. For me, it is a conduit, a system, an efficient network of expediency, allowing me to move swiftly...
Harsh times this week in GuildWars: Nightfall, and the thing definitely seems to be getting more difficult now. Either that, or we've missed something fundamental with the builds. Only one mission this week; the Grand Court of Sebelkeh, and it took three goes, and even then we only came out with the 'Standard' award - i.e. the bare minimum performance it will grudgingly allow you to continue the story with. Oh the ignominy!
The mission is a contrast to many so far, in that the whole thing takes place in one relatively small room, inside the huge floating Temple of Lyssa,...
And off we go again, back on the Free Trial Trail. A change is as good as a rest, they say, and I’m starting with Auto Assault. I’ll save the proper ‘review’ until the two weeks is up, but having spent a good couple of sessions in there now, some first impressions wouldn’t go a miss.
Getting into the Trial is pretty straight forward – you need a PlayNC account, (which I already had from when I bought Nightfall online), a serial code from here (or here if like me you’re in the UK), and the game client from here. It...
All a bit quiet here at the moment, being in something of a between-games lull. There's the weekly Guild Wars: Nightfall thing of course, and I'm still quite captivated by this unusual Not-MMORPG, and there's a lot of mileage left in it. Perhaps the rationing is a way to preserve the games we love to love to death, or something. Second Life continues to fascinate, but is largely an exercise in trying to figure out the arcana behind Sculpted Primitives, and doesn't make for particularly interesting reading.
So failing anything else, here's a picture of my gaming space, as demanded by...
A quite hectic push forward in GuildWars: Nightfall this week, seeing us tackle two quite tricky missions in our own inimitable style, and then trying them again properly and succeeding. Due to a previous misunderstanding about choice of Heroes, we're now currently splitting up at several points along the story, and ending up having to different missions, depending on whether we picked Magrid the Sly, or the Master of Whispers to be our own personal lackeys.
Each of these two supporting characters in the overall epic drama that is the Nightfall campaign, has their own little story arc, and it seems...
Quite without realising it, I seem to have drifted out of EVE Online again. It's not a bitter thing, or an angry thing, unlike many of my previous flouncing hissy-fits. I just seem to have 'had my fill' for now. Clearly, an MMO that you buy, just about struggle through the first (free) month in and then abandon in disgust is Not Very Good, but as well as that, I start to see that the mark of a really good MMO, is that somewhat bizzarely, it's good enough that you can amicably walk away when you've had enough, and that...
Interesting link brought to my attention, here:
MMOGData.com
In which we learn of a new attempt to pick up the baton dropped by the long absent SirBruce, over at the somewhat dusty MMOGChart.com, a widely perused reference for those of us who, like me, have a rather embarrassing Numbers Fetish when it comes to all things MMO. SirBruce himself was last seen in Shanghai, boarding a twin-prop cargo plane full of chicken crates, being piloted to two sinister-looking Chinamen, heading for the Nepalese Himalayas, and is even now, destroying the evil Thugee Cult, and liberating the Shankara Stones. Probably.
Actually, I can't...
After a rocky last session, we launched back into GuildWars: Nightfall this week with a certain dogged resignation, most of which turned out to be quite baseless. A variety of refinements based on last GW rant saw us push through the Rihlon Refuge Mission in a much more successful manner, and surprised us with a Master's (Bonus) completion to boot, and things are on the move once more.
(As with most of my Nightfall posts, a somewhat belated spoiler warning!)
We now find ourselves on the run, once more - you know the drill - vast nefarious army, lead by a...
How about this for Quote of the Week:
'...but Garriott emphasizes that the traditional trading of blows while keeping a sharp eye on your health, shortcut bars, and not much else is just "not great gaming."'
From an article about Tabula Rasa on 1UP.com, (found via Virgin Worlds), which largely seems to be an early preview of the getting-quite-close-to-real SciFi MMOFPSRPG thing that Veteran MMO Beard, Richard Garriot has been working on for the last few years. I deliberately didn't delve too far into the meat of the article, a hands-on look at what Tabula Rasa is actually like, partly because I'm...
Something of a frustrating session this week in the Tuesday N00b Club, exposing one of my long time gripes about this otherwise very serviceable MMO, and the three of us came away from it all in various stages of Grumpy, I suspect. I know I did, and on the whole, I think we've started to hit that stage in the progression from start, to what passes for the 'finish' in an MMO, where the carefree frolicking of youth, becomes replaced with something altogether more gritty, challenging and serious.
We started out as enthusiastically as ever, romping through the necessary primary quests...