Re: Street Fighter 4

Man, diggity. I can’t remember the last time I was this hyped over a fucking ARCADE game. Do they still make those anymore? Yeah they do, and I got SF4 in my neighborhood about 3 days ago. Lemme get a few things out of the way: I live in the sticks (Tamashima, Okayama… about as far from Akihabara as backwoods Alabama is from New York). 33 years old since last June 7th. Married. Kid due in TWO WEEKS. And yet, here I am on the intertrons trolling forums trying to figure out what the fuck a Saving Attack is, and how the fuck I’m gonna shove one up Blanka’s ass the next time I see him.

This game has single handedly reminded me of what it used to be to stick a quarter up on the arcade machine indicating it was your turn next. In Japan, they have some fruity system where you don’t share a machine with the guy you’re battling against. All the machines are single player cabinets, and networked by LAN; so the guy you’re fighting may be on the other side of the arcade, he may be on the other side of the country, or he may be on the opposite side of the machine you’re playing on (usually the case).

With SF4, you (have an option to) buy these gaming cards for 500 yen (5 bucks). You take them with you in your wallet, and use them each time you play. They have a unique numerical identifier that allow you to track your wins and losses, and you can log onto a special SF4 website in japan using your keitai (cel phone) and register your card to your own account. It’s kinda fucking crazy. I’ve tied my own card to my name (リチャード = Richard), so when I play, anyone I’m playing against sees that they’re playing リチャード on the other end. The more you play, the more Zeni you earn, and you can go online later in the evening and buy alternate costume colors, or in game taunt moves to use during matches. You can even customize what Ken (my preferred fighter) will say after a win. You can’t go straight for ‘eat a dick, bitch’, but there are about 20 choices to choose from (in Japanese, this is Japan), to set you apart from the next guy.

My own card; you can see I carved Ken out all special with my knife, so I can distinguish it from the inevitable Chun Li card that I'll be purchasing in the future.

You can form ‘guilds’ of fellow players (via the website), and you can earn extra Zeni if your guild performs well. It’s interesting to see how much arcade gaming, usually a ‘throw away one quarter at a time’, has embraced the internet and really moved forward. While the backwoods city I live in has two machines, I was paired against someone from Tokyo yesterday, and the online play (via two arcade cabinets!) was awesome. You can check your cel to view your win / loss record, and who you happened to be fighting when you laid the smack down. You can even claim your local arcade as your "home turf", and each day you play at least one match on your own turf earns you a stamp on your calendar... multiple stamps can unlock new outfits, etc.

Today I played a bunch of link matches, and didn’t even realize I was kicking someone’s ass for 8 games straight that was 4 feet away from me (on the far side of the cabinet I was playing on). The stakes just feel that much higher when each win or loss is tied to a permanent record. I’m 9 wins for 11 matches played atm since yesterday, and feeling pretty shit hot ;).

I can’t put it in words. It’s awesome. I can’t wait to get up tomorrow and go dump a few hundred yen into the machine at the local Marunaka! HADOKEN!

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Cyber With AoC GMs. It's Cool, They're Into It.

Wow. You'd think they'd have standards for hiring, but I guess when the game is plummeting off the charts, you 'go down' with the ship. OH SNAP! See what I did there?
To []: ..with dual wield barbarians though, I mean TWO?!?! That's a bit difficult for me to handle. I'd rather stick with one big sword.
[|GM|]: You like it rough I take it :)
To []: Of Course, I'm a ***ing rock sniffer.
To []: With daggers.
To []: And I'm specced for second wind =) I can go all night.
[|GM|]: lol wow, I don't think I would ever be the same :)
[|GM|]: um WOw this is turning me on lol.
Yeah, check the LINK for full lols. The GM got fired, but wow.
Just... wow.

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Braid

Here’s me, jumping on the OMG Braid!!1! bandwagon, but seriously… if you haven’t even played the demo, and consider yourself a gamer, you owe it to yourself to stop whatever you’re doing and go get it. For some reason, my credit card was being blocked from buying the full version after playing the demo, but I actually got off my ass, drove to the movie rental / game shop place in town, and bought a 1400 point card to come back home and unlock the full game with.

It’s worth it.

There isn’t too much I can say without giving too much away, but the creators were influenced by the Prince of Persia and Blinx the Time Sweeper. Both of those titles use time manipulation in different ways, but for the most part, the time controlling aspect is limited in one way or another. PoP uses ‘time sand’, and Blinx was so awful I’ve blocked any gameplay experiences I had with it out. Braid takes the approach that ‘why not just have it at your disposal all the time, and you can go as far back in time as you want, none of this ten second burst shit?’ Then it takes it a step further, and changes the rules for each ‘world’.

That’s all I’m going to say. The game thrives on the end user’s sense of exploration and experimentation, and unless you’re a complete asshole that hates enjoying games, you won’t go wrong to just purchase it outright and even skip the demo altogether.

Also, still images don’t do the engine any justice. The backgrounds bloom and shift and change constantly, while moving forward and backward in time. It’s fucking awesome. Go get it.

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Remember "Fury"?

Yeah, dey dead now.

Fury was an MMO (I guess) in a very loose sense of the word; a more accurate description could be that it tried to be an ‘MMArena of Sorts’. At a time when World of Warcraft’s Arena QQing had reached an all time high, along came Fury to try and set the record straight and determine once and for all who was the biggest bad ass in online grudge match competition. I honestly have no idea; I don’t really participate in WoW’s structured implementations of PvP… I kill the opposing faction when they’re trying to steal my ore nodes, and that’s about as deep as it goes for me.

I played Fury after reading on Ming’s Blog how it was supposed to blow away WoW PvP by eliminating crap like the RNG (random number generator… what determines when mace procs ‘happen’), and auto-swings from the equation. All the big names in PvP –well all the ones that Ming knew about and wrote NBA analogies about week in and week out—were creating characters on Fury to really test their l33t skillz (yo). There was this thing called the Fury Challenge going during beta that was giving away real prizes for ending the challenge at the top of the ladder, and while WoW’s Arena system gave you flying donkeys for being number one, there was no cash benefit to doing well in Arena at that point.

I just found it funny that it went from OMG FURY DAY ONE, to FINAL THOUGHTS ON FURY : / in the span of four days for the most vocal PvPers WoW had to offer. It apparently did the same for everyone else, as the servers will be closing down possibly today or tomorrow. The company selling the game even goes so far as to say if you bought the game less than a month ago to return your copy to the store for a refund. Ouch.

Fury used a kinda cool combat system where you had various elements that you could build up and then release. Little spells like “Pew Pew Fire Bolt Rank 1” gave you 1 fire orb each time you used it, and then “ZOMG Fire Wave Blast 9” took 3 fire orbs to release. You’d have to pew pew a bit, build up some fire, and then nuke the fuck out of someone. You could choose from about 6 schools of magic (fire, water, air, blood, chaos, nerdrage, or whatever), and certain schools had good synergy with each other. Fury also had player collision, and did away with autoswing way before Conan arrived on the scene.

I seem to remember that gameplay was extremely frantic, like playing WoW on a Quake map. Lots of jumping and using magnetic lift pads, and generally dying. You could even grab powerups on the playing field, similar to health packs or damage multipliers in an FPS. There were healers, but I never played one, a lot of the spells were HoTs, fire and forget and hope your team lived through the onslaught. Every class had a root or snare, so generally melee classes got the ass end of the stick, but it was interesting to play. Well, interesting on paper anyway. I played the beta, grew bored of it, and didn’t bother to reinstall it after an OS reinstall.

Anyway. GG Fury. We can’t say you didn’t try. : /

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Death Knights

Death knights are an interesting experiment by Blizz. People have whined and cried about wanting hero classes as long as I can remember playing this game. Blizzard has finally caved in and offered a new playable class, years after the game’s release, but they’re going about it in an interesting manner. By allowing people to skip the bullshit grind associated with ‘old WoW’ it seems like they’re basically saying ‘yeah, we know nobody fucking plays on those continents anymore, and trying to find groups for Scarlet Monastery is a fucking joke, so here… just take a level 55 toon, run a few quests, and blow this popsicle stand’.

GG?

The leveling curve for death knights is ridiculously accelerated, and tries to dump every skill, talent, and gimmick on the player in what feels like a 20 minute crash course on the class. Why they force people who want to level a mage, for example, to torture themselves from level 1 to 55 is a complete mystery. Oh wait... ‘subscription model revenue’, riiiight. But for some reason, death knights even have a +75% walking speed buff while in their ‘home city’, as if Blizz is saying ‘yeah, even walking around sucks, hurry up and finish this part and get to the Outlands ASAP woo!’.

I’m personally leveling two new alts, and am really beginning to feel the strain at level 32 on my rogue and 40 on my hunter. The hunter is alliance, and that whole side of the game is still new to me, but my patience is wearing thin, and time seems to have slowed to a crawl on both of these toons. One of the main issues I have with leveling to 60 is how fucking spread out everything is on these two continents. It’s rare to grab all the quests in the zone and just crank them out, then run back to town to twelve question marks like I used to do at the early levels. Once flight paths begin to open up, every quest seems to involve flying halfway around the world to hand a letter to some douche bag in a church, only to jump right back on the same flight to bring it to who had it in the first place. Or you pick up a quest in Stormwind that involves killing murlocs on the fucking moon. Nothing is densely packed anymore, until you get out to the Outlands, and can smash your face against Hellfire Peninsula for a level or four.

Death knights, however, get the VIP pass to the outlands. It doesn’t really make any sense.

Whatever. The system itself that they’ve put in place alternates between feeling like too much at once in a good way, to be too much at once in a bad way. You start the game in some floating necropolis thing, and hey! There’s the Lich King himself! It feels hokey, like in Star Wars Galaxies, when you roll a brand new toon, and are immediately rushed to the the Millennium Fucking Falcon with Chewcockoff and Ham Salad. Or in LotRO when you roll a hobbit and ZOMG LOOK OUT there’s a Ring Wraith! Why not just spawn noobs with in the fiery pit of Mount Doom with The One Ring in their Inventory?

You’re level 55, but you don’t have any talent points yet. You have a full set of armor, mostly greens with a blue ring or something, and your very first quest is to forge your rune blade. Within minutes, you’re flying some death bird Tony Hawk looking thing down the countryside to kill villagers, rape their livestock, and generally try and be a badass. The problem is that you don’t really feel like a badass, because you didn’t really earn any of the badassery yet. Usually, you start with ‘auto-attacking rabbits for the ex-pees’, and when you earn your first genuine attack move (mortal strike, pyroblast, whatever) you feel pretty bad ass. While death knights don’t spawn with 40 talent points to dish out, you get one pretty much every 37 seconds until you’ve ‘caught up’ to being level 55. Almost every quest gives you a piece of blue armor, a huge stack of gold, and one or two talent points. Shit like ‘go talk to bill, standing three feet away’ earns you 16,276 XP, a blue plate chest piece, and 2 points to sink into talents that you have no clue of how to use yet.

Blizzard went all out in the ‘hey let’s have fun quests’ dept, and while there are your general ‘collect 15 of the flaming arrows we’re raining down on this town’, they’re sprinkled liberally with ‘jump in mine cart to be carried onto the boat and then blast 100 people on the beach with the ship’s cannons!’ kind of thing. You fly around on mounts dropping bombs, you steal a horse that will become your death steed (free epic land mount at level 55), you travel into the ‘nether world’ to do battle with a ghostly boss… not a whole lot of ‘kill 800 alligators to collect 12 alligator tails’. Maybe I just haven’t reached that point yet.

I’m being negative. The quests are generally fun, and while gimmicky, serve to break up the grind. That’s good. You’re overloaded with great gear, gold, and talent points faster than you can deal with. Sure, awesome! Your trade skills start out at an advanced level. First aid begins at 270. No running around in the Barrens farming wool cloth. Sweet. And while you might not know what talents do, after some experimentation, you’ll find a build that works for you, respec, and be fine with it. But once you’ve reached level 58, everything is going to come crawling to a stop, and you’ll be one of 8 billion DKs LFG Ramps.

Speaking of 8 billion DKs, I was under the impression (for some reason), that the DK starting zone was going to be instanced. I honestly don’t remember where I heard this, but it seemed to be very AoC of them to do so, and generally I felt it was a pretty stupid idea. Not only would it compare directly to the whole destiny questline mode of AoC where your first 20 levels are done mostly alone, but not having other DKs running around to group with seemed like a bad idea. So far, this seems not to be the case, which I think is a good thing.

Anyway, I’m sure there a billion pages out there on the intertrons that can list each DK move and how they all interact with each other. That isn’t my intention. I’m not here to give you a guide to make the most effective use of your abilities or link you uber talent builds. My DK hasn’t even left Ebon Hold yet to go make his mark on the world. I’m still running around in the DK equivalent of the Valley of Trials. I’m still of the mind that time spent in the beta is a waste of time. Once Wrath goes live, everyone will vacate the old zones in favor of fresh new content, and unless my toons are all level 70, I’m going to be left in the dust begging guildies for Underbog runs. It’ll be a painful transition, as I’ll be too low to go to Northrend, but too high to be grouping with the flood of new DKs.

It’s good to see a new playable class. It’ll be interesting to see the forums go through the general wah wah QQ syndrome of ‘wah wah hold me, the DK melee DPS is totally making rogues obsolete’ (not gonna happen), or ‘wah wah mommy, I can’t tank anymore as dual wield fury because death knights do it better’ (okay, probably true, but real prot tanks have nothing to worry about). All in all, I’m mostly just excited to have new instances to run, with or without death knights at my side, and am focused on getting my noobs up to 70 as soon as possible.

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"Operation Immortality"

So, yeah. That Garriott guy that made Tabula Rasa apparently didn’t get the ‘ur game failed’ memo, and is going off on some brand new tangent to try and drum up new subscribers. I think that's him on the right. One is the loneliest number, so I could see how being the only person playing an MMO you created could wear you down.

Apparently, if you subscribe to Tabula Rasa now you can have some DNA (?) shot off into space or something. While it might be neat if your DNA was found by aliens, cloned into some mutated superhuman army, and sent back to Earth to colonize the planet for… ok wait, this actually sounds pretty rad.

However! There are a few things horribly wrong with the implementation. Apparently you can’t bite off your finger and have them send that into space, it’ll just be some dumb ‘DNA Sequence’ file on a flash drive or some crap. While I hope our alien friends are advanced enough to have evolved to the USB 1.1 specification (lol 12Mbits/sec ), what happens if their laptop hard drives are some new, ohidunnoALIEN, file system? Maybe they’ll load our DNA sequences in their alien version of WinAmp, and the sound shooting forth might be some horrendous battle cry. Even worse, what if it’s a mating call, and they all come to Earth expecting surprise alien buttsecks?

There are so many things wrong with the idea it’s just silly. The website takes another turn for the worse when they start soliciting ideas for ‘Mankind’s Greatest Achievements’ and then it asks you what your favorite movie is.

…

I guess that’s better than ‘Which was your favorite episode of Friends’?

You go, Richard Garriot. Just… you go girl.

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A Look at Wrath of the Lich King

Writing this feels a bit like déjà vu for me, as the first article I ever wrote for NotAddicted was when I was in the beta for Burning Crusade. Go read that article if you missed it the first time around.

I'm not kidding. Go read it. It’s the "prequel" to this one.

The advice I gave everyone then is pretty much the exact same advice I’ll give everyone now. Go level an alt if it’s anything you’re interested in doing, and tell your raid group to fuck off and do the same until the expansion drops. Do dailies if they make you happy, but don’t spend gold on anything frivolous. No need to buy jewel crafting recipes anymore, or any of that shit. It’s all officially obsolete.

I myself recently had my main account banned, and lost my 70 prot warrior, 70 combat rogue, and 70 resto druid. At the time it happened I was totally okay with it, because I was getting pretty sick of the end game hassle. I was in a similar state of mind with the level 60 end game right before getting into the Burning Crusade beta, and being in that beta really gave Live WoW a new lease on life, play-wise. The most important thing to have when Wrath of the Lich King officially goes on sale will not be huge stacks of gold, uber enchanted gear, or a winning arena team. It will be the numbers seven and zero on your character sheet. That’s it. If you ever wanted to roll a new class, NOW is the time to get that ball rolling. Wiping on raid bosses or standing around with your thumb in your ass at the AH can wait.

I was given a new account by a friend that has a level 70 warlock, 63 paladin, and two other classes I’ve started again from scratch (36 hunter and another 34 rogue). I really enjoy the rogue play style, and am really interested to see how the new rogue talents work out in the expansion. I obviously am not going to waste time leveling the rogue in the beta, as everything you do in there is ultimately pointless and wiped, but on live, I’m starting again from scratch and running around with Ripperjack on Barthilas when time permits. It’s worth the hassle, and I’m not really losing anything except for the time spent grinding back up to 70, which really isn’t that horrible anyway. The fact that I had BT gear on the previous rogue doesn’t matter, as shit you will get for the most basic of quests will trump epics, easily. Like haste gear? Here ya go, get a wheelbarrow, we got lots.

I mean, obviously, rogues with warglaives won’t be ditching them in favor of the first green they come across, but if you roll up to Wrath wearing scrubby ass gear it really doesn’t matter. The early quests and dungeons aren’t tuned for T6 gear, they’re tuned for people that leveled from 1 to 68 and then came straight to Northrend. Think about it, when you roll a new toon, do you go do MC at 60? No, you go straight to Outlands as soon as you can, and skip the whole side grade crap. The warlock on the account I was given was horrendously botted to 70… it has like zero rep with every faction, and hadn’t even bought skills past level 62 or so. I’m still wearing the level 60 Sapphiron Drape for fuck’s sake. I have a whopping 500 spell damage, and I think some of that is actually from new gear I’ve already gotten. I think one of the most frustrating parts is that I’m sitting on like 178 first aid, and will need to go farm mageweave and crap to get up to where I can start using the new Frostweave Cloth that drops to make uber duber Band-Aids.

Fact is, though, it just doesn’t matter.

I’m able to do what I need to do to get mobs dead, and finish quests, and I’m slowly swapping out the shit gear for quest rewards and green drops. It’s the BC beta all over again, except my warrior back then was pretty well geared (decked to the teeth in MC, with some BWL sprinkled here and there). I seriously didn’t even spend that long in the BC beta, just long enough to realize my time would be better spent leveling a druid and rogue to 60, because those were two other classes I had an interest in playing. It’s cool to play around in Illidan Mode on the warlock (yeah, you can transform into a fucking demon), but seriously, that can pretty much wait.

I realize I’m being kinda overly negative about it. It isn’t a bad thing. The beta looks great. I’ve seen all of three zones so far (Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and Zul'Drak), but what is there to say? You either hate WoW’s art direction or love it, and I love it, so I think everything looks great. I think WoW really nailed the graphical style they were aiming for, and they’ve continued to turn out more great zones to look at and run around in. Just staying on the road and running as far as I can on my horse is fun again. I almost don't want to see it all, so it's still fresh for later.

I’m in some huge guild that has way too many people, but the vibe on the beta servers is usually pretty good. People are excited to be playing the next part of WoW, and it comes across in random people you meet and group with. Quests are new and interesting, and you can’t just open Wowhead and look everything up yet. That’s nice. You have to actually soak it up and pay attention, which is sorely lacking on Live. It really makes you wish you didn’t have enough time to soak it all up before a new one is released, but the overall polish they provide makes up for how long it took to finish once you do get to see it. Tigole had an interview recently where he said he doesn’t care really if WoW innovates at every turn, to him it’s more important that the things they do, they do well. You can crap all over that statement if you’re looking for something 'new and different', but polish > gimmicks in my book.

I think my favorite part so far has to be getting one shotted by paladins everywhere I go on the PvP server. They apparently have a ‘bug’ that lets them crit certain spells for like 20-30k or something ridiculous. I think it isn’t a bug, but an inside joke by the dev team. Ret pallies wanted their DPS, so here it is, but too bad it won’t make it to Live. ;)

In the long run, I really just can’t say it enough... get on an alt, or go spend quality time with the dog. When this drops, it’s going to consume you for a good chunk of time, so get the brownie points in with the loved ones now. Any time spent in game should be spent on a toon that isn’t max level. I told you to read it at the beginning of this, but maybe you didn’t listen. Take a look back in time to Oct 19th, 2006, and know that everything I said back then holds true again, and the wheel of time is coming full circle one more time. Won’t be the last. Get ready, the expansion is coming.

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