Star Wars Galaxies
My first "MMO-like" experiences were with BBS door games back in the mid-90s. Some of you will remember the likes of Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, Hack & Slash, Trade Wars, Barren Realms Elite, and so forth. These sorts of games eventually evolved into MUDs, which can accurately be summed up as text-interface MMORPGs. I've played one or two MUDs casually, but I was never deeply into one. My first "true" MMO experience was with the 3-month subscription that I had to Star Wars Galaxies within a week of its launch.
I've played three MMORPGs over the years: Star Wars Galaxies, World of WarCraft, and Guild Wars. I was never deeply into any of them, although there is still a glimmer of hope for WoW. There were times when I seriously considered getting Ultima Online, Everquest, and Dark Ages of Camelot, but I was always held back in figuring that I wouldn't have enough time to properly get a good experience out of them. I very, very nearly cracked with Final Fantasy XI for obvious reasons (Final Fantasy!), but it was the Star Wars themed game that eventually broke me down.
SWG proved to be far too "hardcore" of an experience to hold my interest. My character was a smuggler, and I quickly discovered that completing quests didn't provide much reward and gaining levels took a very long time. I also discovered that by setting up automated mining installations and selling the raw minerals at auction, I could make a lot of credits. Pretty soon I was running around maintaining a fleet of massive automated miners and making tens of thousands of credits per day. Occasionally I'd see something cool or get in a tense firefight with some hostile wildlife, but for the most part, I gradually began to find that SWG was boring the shit out of me. Some of the work that I did in SWG was less interesting than my real-life job, which just goes to show how much of an escape SWG wasn't.
One aspect of SWG that I really enjoyed was exploration. It was fun to travel to new areas and explore the make-shift towns that other players had set up. But the world of SWG just didn't feel interactive enough. You could sit in an authentic Star Wars cantina and watch the entertainers, but nothing really happened--it was just a bunch of geeks grinding their characters and bitching about the game. You could travel to exotic planets, but really you were just using SWG as a model-viewing app; the online portion of it isn't even strictly necessary just to see the terrain. Perhaps what really killed the game for me is that I didn't interact socially enough, which is a problem that I've frequently had with online games over the years.
After about 10 weeks, I threw up my arms and vowed never to play SWG again. For a while after that, I would get small cravings for it, but nothing serious. Eventually I came to loathe SWG as an MMO, and I ranted about how Neverwinter Nights had better MMO potential than SWG. I still think that sometimes.
Then came World of WarCraft, which may very well be the very best RPG that has ever been made--perhaps even the best game known to history so far. WoW seems to me to be impressively balanced; whether you're hardcore or not, and whether you're a social butterfly or not, WoW is fairly accomodating. What dissapoints me about WoW is that the world is far less dynamic than an game like SWG where players can errect their own buildings and such. As much as it has the potential for abuse and other technical challenges, I think that player-created structures and towns in an MMO add a lot to the depth of the game. Other than that, though, there isn't much from SWG that I miss while playing WoW.
Guild Wars is, of course, WoW "lite." Orginally I got into it simply because my GF plays so much WoW that I don't often get to spend any time with WoW myself. Guild Wars is not as fully fun and addictive as WoW, but it is definitely similar. It takes some technical shortcuts (eg. you can only meet other players in towns--not out in the wild), but I like the game's art style (still not as impressive as WoW, in my opinion) and the fact that there is no subscription fee is a huge plus. WoW is a better game than Guild Wars, hands-down, but Guild Wars is arguably a better value simply because it is so comparitively cheap. I also like the fact that Guild Wars has a story campaign that feels a lot like the kind that you would find in a single-player RPG, and that there are henchmen that you can add to your party if you prefer to try and avoid having to party up with random idiots online.
Anyway, that about sums up my MMO experience. Sometimes I still kind of wonder if I could have gotten into FF XI; I definitely should have tried that in place of SWG. I should also probably note that I did consider trying SWG again after the Jump to Lightspeed expansion pack game out (I love the old X-Wing and Tie Fighter games), but in the end it didn't sound like enough fun to draw me back into the fold. Anyway, that's my ramble for today.
WoW Fixed
I finally got WoW working again last night, and all it took was patching my router's firmware to the lastest version. I should have tried that earlier. :oops:
For some insane reason, I decided to start a new WoW character last night--an Undead Priest. I powered my way up to level 6 in a couple of hours; maybe I can steal a couple of hours per week and get him at least into the 20s in the next few months. I really should be focusing on playing Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, Disgaea, and Xenogears. And Lunar: Dragon Song too, I guess. I'm going to get Magna Carta: Tears of Blood when it comes out, but I have no clue as to how I'm going to find the time to play it.
Last night I also conquered colossii #7, #8, and #9, and I'll be writing a bit on Shadow of the Colossus soon. I even found fifteen minutes to play Ghosts n' Goblins (man do I ever suck at that game.) Wow, I sure was productive, gaming-wise. It's not a wonder I'm so tired this morning, then.
WoW Patch 1.8.1 Broken?
Since the latest WoW patch, I've had a bitch of a time trying to get into the game. I'm having obvious connection problems with my character not fully loading and all of the other players and NPCs appearing as frozen "Unknown Identity" characters. My GF is understandably frustrated as she plays WoW 20 hours per week and hasn't been able to get online lately.
Initially I just thought that I had a bad router setup, since my router recently died and I had to replace it. No amount of fiddling with the thing has helped though, and I've noticed that there is quite a bit of activity on the WoW Tech Support forums (
two threads in particular caught my eye) complaining that since the last patch lots of network connectivity problems have cropped up. This problem appears to be affecting hundreds, or possibly thousands of players. Bad patches do happen from time to time.
It's also a funny coincidence that what sounds like one of the more serious snags to hit WoW yet (if reports are to be believed) has arrived just as BlizzCon is starting up. I have to wonder if somehow the 1.8.1 patch wasn't rushed out of the door to make time for the big party, since I imagine that Blizzard's programmers and engineers probably get to have a bit of time off to enjoy the festivities.
Physics is the Sweetness
Alright, I admit, this is a pretty simple observation to make. Anyone who has been paying attention to video game technology in the last ten years knows that a lot of games have physics engines. The only point I'd like to make here is that lately there seems to be a greater mainstream emphasis on physics in video games, and that this latest round of fascination with rigid-body physics and rag-doll physics has detracted from some of the usual emphasis that gets placed on graphics engines.
This is a rant that I really should have made last year when Burnout 3 and Half-Life 2 were all the rage, because those are two of the games that I think emphasize this trend the most strongly. Both of these games have great graphics engines, but they also both heavily employ the use of visually stunning physical interactions between in-game objects to wow the audience. In a sense, the physics engines in these games are as big of a deal as the graphics engines, and certainly a bigger deal than any of the in-game animations (no offence to the animators who worked on those games.)
Game physics doesn't just affect the visual quality of a game, however--it also has a lot to do with the gameplay. Katamari Damacy is but one simple example of a game that employs some basic physics to influence or even define gameplay; many games are like that. For a recent example of a game that makes heavy use of physics in gameplay, I'll turn to Shadow of the Colossus: while playing it, I was really struck by just how much you can feel the physics in the game.
Obviously, modern video games lack the ability to make the player directly feel physical motion while playing. Also, some people get motion sick while playing FPSes and other motion intensive games, and I am not one of them. But while playing Shadow of the Colossus, I could definitely feel the hulking movements of those colossii. The visual cues of a colossus stretching, swinging, and shaking, and the little in-game hero clinging on for dear life, are so true to life that picking up on them is effortless, and you find yourself getting that "wooooaaah" feeling that is usually reserved for rollercoasters.
The net result is that Shadow of the Colossus feels seamless in much the same way that Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3 do: stuff that happens simply looks right, and it's as much because of the physics engine as because of the graphics engine. Hooray for physics!
Age of Empires III
I picked up my copy of AoE III from EB Games yesterday. The funny thing about it is, when I ordered the game a month ago, I decided to go for the "special edition." Why not? Imagine my surprise when the clerk at EB reaches behind the counter and pulls out a mammoth-sized box. For a second, I thought that I might have ordered an Age of Empires board game by accident; it certainly weighed enough to contain a board and ~100 minatures. I'm tempted to take a picture of the box and post it here just so you can clearly see what I'm talking about.
As for the game itself, I played for a few hours--a couple of single-player campaign missions and then a few handful of multiplayer games. AoE III is alright; I will definitely continue to play it. But it didn't exactly shatter the RTS mold, and I wasn't blown away by it. It's solid, but nothing more than that, in my opinion.
Of course, I have to qualify that opinion with a plethora of little factoids. First off, my PC isn't good enough to run AoE III in its full glory. With everything turned down so that it runs nice and smoothly, the game actually looks less graphically impressive than Rise of Nations or even WarCraft III. But I do understand that when I buy a new gaming PC (hopefully in the new year), AoE III is going to be spectacular.
Secondly, and more importantly, I'm not a massive RTS fan. I played WarCraft II and StarCraft back in the day, although not a whole lot. I've played other "fringe" RTSes like Z and Highway to the Reich, and I like those games a lot. I play WarCraft III and Rise of Nations and get a kick out of them. But I do not play any of these games competitively (in fact, I'm barely competent at them), and I'm not a seasoned enough RTS fan to really distinguish between the likes of WC3, RoN, and AoE III. Oh, and let's not also forget that I didn't play AoE, AoE II, or Age of Mythology. AoE III is the first of the series that I've actually played.
So now you can understand what I mean when I say that AoE III is fun for me, but I don't really feel qualified to say if its a great game or not. Maybe it is great and I just can't appreciate its true glory, or maybe it's a dog and my taste just isn't discerning enough. I'm a casual RTS player, at best. Leave me to my TBS and RPG titles. Not that I won't continue to play and enjoy the occasional RTS, which is what AoE III is to me.
I'm continuing to make steady progress on Digital Devil Saga, having hit the six hour mark. I thought it would be tougher to concentrate on it given all of the other games that are distracting me, but DDS is such a purely addictive game that it remains in the fore of my mind at all times, although I am definitely pacing myself with it. One potential weakness with DDS is that the dungeons have a very repetitive look, so playing too heavily over several days might get to be hard on the eyes, but in short spurts it is very entertaining.
As for Lunar: Dragon Song, I'm getting frustrated with the slow pace of the game. I cannot believe what a terrible design decision it was for them to force the player to choose between gaining either experience points or items in battles; the end result is that money is extremely tight in Lunar DS because you aren't gaining any while you're levelling up your characters. Items are expensive and completing "jobs" to earn cash is a real pain even though the idea behind it is fun in theory. I'm also finding that battles are slow paced even when using the R button to speed them up. The "fast" speed, activated with R, is the pace that battles should progress at normally, and the R button should speed battles up to double that pace.
If battles in Lunar DS awarded both experience points and items every time, and if the pace of battle was sped up a great deal, then I think it would be a game that I could live with. It still wouldn't be an excellent game, though; for that they'd need to step up the story development a notch and not have the player revisit the same areas nearly so often. An extra helping of Lunar-style charm wouldn't hurt either.
Ravnica
I had a very busy day today playing the latest Magic the Gathering set, Ravnica: City of Guilds. This isn't really about video games, of course, but it's still very much a "gaming" thing, so I guess I'll rant about it a bit.
I'm quite new to Magic. I'd always sort of avoided it (largely due to lack of available funds to play) until a couple of years ago. I started playing 8th Edition at right around the time that Mirrodin came out, and first started exploring Mirrodin block with the release of Darksteel. I was very much into Mirroding by the time Fifth Dawn was released, and that was the first Magic expansion set that I actually looked forward to and got excited about, but I was still very new to the game at the time and not a strong player at all.
It's fair to say that I anticipated the release of Champions of Kamigawa more than any other Magic set to date. I really get a kick out of a lot of Asian-themed stuff, and I was looking forward to more of the fun mechanics and such that I'd seen in Mirrodin. Kamigawa turned out to be a let-down, although it is still a good block and I still play it quite a bit--it just wasn't the "end all, be all" set that I was hoping for. It's hard to describe in concrete terms exactly why it is, but consider the following bit as an example that occurs over and over again throughout the block: I really dig rats--definitely one of my favourite subtypes--and I really love the idea of ninjas, but when you put the two together to get "rat ninjas," suddenly I don't find them nearly as exciting anymore. I was looking forward to some kind of badass, dark ninja with deadly assassin abilities, and while Throat Slitter is a cool card, I just can't get over the fact that it's a goofy cartoon rat ninja! I'm not trying to be really hard on Kamigawa here; it's just that when they said it was going to have spirits, rats, samurai, and ninjas, I expected something very different from what was actually delivered.
Cut forward to present day and the release of Ravnica. I was really impressed with the previews, and a friend and I decided that we'd attend the pre-release as our first pre-release event ever. The crowd was unbearably geeky, and we're not sure if we'll do the pre-release thing again, but the set is astoundingly cool. With Ravnica, I've had the experience over and over again of seeing and awesome card, looking to the expansion symbol and exclaiming "wow, it's a common!" So today I got together with my small group of casual Magic friends and brought an entire box of Ravnica boosters. My first box of boosters! We did a five booster each sealed deck thing and then, because I think it's a much more efficient use of booster packs, a Rochester draft (what can I say: we had time to burn.) I love Ravnica. This is going to be the first Magic set that I ever take really seriously, which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy Kamigawa or that I don't still think Mirrodin is a lot of fun, but Ravnica is the first set that I've been really ready for.
One thing that's surprised me about Ravnia is that I didn't think I'd ever really take the whole "guild" idea seriously, but the way that the guilds work is so natural that I'm already becoming very familiar with all four of them without really trying to. Black and Green have been two of my favourite colours right from when I first started playing, so Golgari is naturally the guild that I'm the most interested in so far. I love the Dredge mechanic, and the sacrifice-based combos are really fun (reminds me a little of Mirrodin, even.) The other three guilds are all good too--I played a lot of Boros in the limited events I did, and although I don't have a copy yet, I really like Razia's card.
Anyway, I'm not going to rant at length about Magic right now. I just wanted to throw out there that Ravnica is out this weekend and it's been a big deal for me and my friends.
For the record, I also play Magic Online--primarily leagues, although also the occasional booster draft. I also like to buy cheap commons (they have trade bots now that will sell 128 commons for 1 ticket) and build fun decks out of that; I've been playing around with an Elf/Beast based deck that makes heavy use of Wirewood Savage. I love that card! But right--no ranting about Magic. Not now. Later, maybe.
I've started playing Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (about two and a half hours so far), and it really is one of the best console RPGs I've played since FF X. The game is so well put together, and the crazy characters and setting really draw you in. Four stars for sure, although the dark and violent theme of the game definitely won't appeal to everybody (ditto on the heavy Japanese manga influence.) It certainly appeals to me though.
I'm also still slogging through Lunar: Dragon Song. It contrasts heavily with Digital Devil Saga in that DDS is so well designed and Lunar: DS is so poorly designed. Ah well. The real shame is that these games are distracting me heavily from Xenogears (I'm seven years overdue on finishing that one) and Disgaea. They'll all be finished in time, though.
Hmmm... what comes out next week?
Zelda: Minish Cap, Fire Emblem
On the subject of games that I have at least finished in recent history (although you might be able to count Battlefield 2, if it didn't go on forever), I polished off Zelda: Minish Cap back in August. You've probably heard it all before, but that's one solid little game, and probably the best Zelda game to have come out in recent years. Everything about it smacks of classic Zelda, and if you're a Zelda fan you'll easily find it appealing, whether you enjoyed A Link to the Past, Zelda 64, or Wind Waker the most.
Another GBA game that I took a stab at is Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. I haven't made it very far, though--only about five maps or so. I'd heard that there's a part in the game where you can get into arena battles, or something, and use that to level up your characters. That might be really handy because the thing I found the most frustrating about the first GBA Fire Emblem is that once a character falls really far behind in levels, it's very difficult to use them anymore. The real problem here is that the enemy AI always employs a strategy of trying to kill at least one of your characters if they can, and once a character dies you lose them forever. I never did get over the idea of just losing a character once in a while and plodding on through the game, so after about 20 maps or so, I stalled on the original Fire Emblem. I should really just check a walk-through and see how much further I have to go to finish the game. Anyway, I wonder if Sacred Stones will end up having the same problem or not. It would be nice if the enemy AI played more strategically and didn't just try to mob the most vulernable unit every time, though--it's clearly as if the enemy is programmed with a victory condition of "kill at least one player character" rather than trying to defend any objectives or anything like that.
Another fault with Fire Emblem is that the dialogue is pretty lengthy and not too heavy on content. There is some genuine drama in there, and the character portraits are nice, but sometimes I find myself wishing that the writing was a bit more mature. I realise that the game is meant to be suitable for younger audiences to some degree, of course.
Overall, I found Fire Emblem to be worth playing, but definitely not without some annoying problems. Minish Cap, on the other hand, was simply a joy from start to finish. They should have added a master quest. :)
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 has hit. Over on RPG Fan, John McCarroll has give the game
an overwhelmingly supportive score of 99. The only catch is, I haven't played the original SMT:DDS game yet, which my buddy Fritzkrieg advised me to invest in some time ago. Given that I'm still working on RPGs like Disgaea (chapter 10 now), Xenogears ('cause I want to be able to play Xenosaga someday), and now Lunar: Dragon Song, finding time for Shin Megami Tensei games will be a huge challenge. It may be, however, a challenge that I can't afford to not take up.
Also getting a lot of good reviews at the moment is Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Well, I do have a DS, although the last Castlevania I played was Circle of the Moon. From what I'm hearing, Dawn of Sorrow is the best hand-held version of Castlevania yet, so I just might have to invest in it, but between this new RPG crisis and all of the other games I'm wrapped up in (Burnout Revenge, Battlefield 2, We Love Katamari, etc.), how will I find the time to play it? At this rate, I might need to schedule a week off from work, or something.
Lunar: Dragon Song
I've played it for less than an hour so far, but I'm quite disappointed with Lunar: Dragon song. I feel that the
IGN review is charitable, to say the least. The fact that there's a "mode" that you need to toggle in order to get experience from combat, or that you lose HP simply by holding the B button to run (even in towns and other areas without enemies), or that you can't actually target enemies with your attacks in combat--it's all a bit much to take. Any one of those things on its own would have been a strike against the game, and the cumulation of all of them reflects very poorly on the people responsible for directing and producing Lunar: Dragon Song. What really stings, though, is that Lunar is a legendary RPG series with deeply loyal fans--it is a name that invokes a great deal of respect, and Lunar: Dragon Song is now something of a blight on that name.
All that having been said, I fully intend to slog through the game and try to finish it. It might be flawed, but it's still an RPG, and it's still at least somewhat playable. I just really wish that instead of having tried to take the game in a new direction, they'd just have copied the traditional Lunar formula letter for letter.
In other exciting RPG news, I read
over on Joystiq that in addition to the FF IV remake coming to GBA, there are going to be GBA versions of FF V and VI as well. A lot of my friends (and myself) have wanted this to happen for a long time, so it's a reasonably big deal to me. After all, I've said before that FF VI is the best in the series, and I stand by that--it has the most interesting plot, the best characters, and the darkest, moodiest setting. Not to look down too much on FF VII, VIII, IX, and especially X, of course.
Also, is it just me, or is it more than a coincidence that games like Lunar: Dragon Song and Advance Wars: Dual Strike are conveniently abbreviated as Lunar DS and Advance Wars DS? It's like the whole Nintendo 64 naming convention (Mario 64, Zelda 64, etc.) all over again, but with more creative flair this time. I think that's pretty cool.
Capcom Classics Collection
I picked up Capcom Classics Collection today. I've been looking forward to this one for a while, since I'm a big fan of 1943 and Bionic Commando, amoung others. The package turned out to be an even better deal than I expected, as it includes 1942, 1943, 1943 Kai, Bionic Commando, Gun.Smoke, Street Fighter II, SF2 Champion Ed, SF2 Turbo, Ghosts and Goblins, Ghouls and Ghosts, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, and Final Fight, just to catch the major highlights. This is definitely one of the most worthwhile "arcade classics" packages available these days, and I strongly recommend it.
If you're into Street Fighter, Capcom Classics Collection nicely complements the Street Fighter Collection, which has SF3.3: The Third Strike as well as a crazy free-for-all mixture of Street Fighter II titles. What Street Fighter Collection doesn't have is the plain ol' arcade versions of Street Fighter II prior to Super SF2, and that's why having Capcom Classics Collection is worthwhile. Also along the Capcom front, I have (and love) Mega Man Collection, and am even looking forward to the Mega Man X collection.
Capcom aside, there is one other "arcade collection" package that I strongly recommend, and that is the Midway Arcade Collection vol 1. It includes amazing games like Robotron 2048, Sinistar, Rampart, Joust, Defender, Spy Hunter, and more and more. That collection is simply a gem and is well worth the money. Other publishers like Namco and Sega could take a cue from the likes of Midway and Capcom and be less stingy about what they give out in their classics collection releases.
You may have noticed that the tone of my blog has shifted. I'm opening it up from tight little rants about specific titles to just more of a long-winded rambling format. I think this makes for more entertaining reading, and will perhaps motivate me to just casually spout off about whatever I happen to be playing. I don't know if I'll manage to make updates frequently enough to draw any regular readers, though.
