More Borderlands

I'm upset.
Very upset..
You go and buy a 360 b/c 'everyone' at work has one and we're all gonna play games. And then people go playing WoW again, stick with only a select few games and/or don't end up getting the games you get.
Borderlands is said game.
Out of maybe 10ish friends/coworkers, only one of them will end up getting it.

Once again; After Halo, before Modern Warfare 2 and Left for Dead 2... lots of competition..

Anyways, more things about Borderlands!!!!

You end up killing alot of Skaggs (alien doggies that have mouths like the one in Blade Trinity/Resident Evil)

Its hard.
When I heard my brother said it was hard, I was nervous b/c he dominates games, especially shooters.
And it is.
Many times, like an mmo, you'll need to grind baddies to gain lvls and better weapons to take on certain parts of the games, especially bosses. These bosses are no pushovers! Its almost unfair sometimes.

But thats where multiplayer comes in.

This game is meant to be played together; as more people enter the game (up to 4 co-op), the stronger/more enemies spawn, but also the better the loot. For example, in single player, you'd open one of the earliest chests and they'd be only 2 guns in it, with 4 people playing there were 4 guns in it. When you die in single player, the boss/enemies go back to full health, but any enemies you killed stay killed. In multiplayer, as long as one person stays alive, you can hold off the baddies till you friends run back from one of many spawn points.

Roland (Soldier-Deploys Turrets), Lilith (Siren - Stealth assassin), Mordecai (Hunter - Hawk Sniper), Brick (Tank - Punching Berzerker)

Talking about dying.. you have shields and shield mods which you can buy at the vendor. Some have higher capacity (more shield strength), some have higher recharge rate, some slowly heals you, some causes explosions of an elemental type when the shield depletes. Health drops off baddies when it can tell people are hurt. And if you manage to lose all your health, you'll go into the death mode found in Gears of War 2, but instead of just hobbling around, you fight on your knees and IF you kill a mob before the timer runs out (20ish seconds) you get what is called second wind and you get back up with about 25% health. Very good. There is no limit that you can get it (but i haven't died that many times consecutively)

As I think about it, its like Left for Dead when you lose all your health.

Matchmaking... lets just say, don't do 'Quick Game.' Sure it may be the fastest to getup and go, but my lvl 8 was put into a game that had a lvl 1, 23 and 40... lol. So I switched to my lvl 25 soldier (turret guy). You can do 'Custom Games' which will show you a list of current games with people, level and quest they're on.

Problem.. laggy. I joined 3 games tonight and the lag was 'bad'. Not unbearable, but not totally playable. It was good that the laggiest (sp?) game I was fighting lvl 4/5s as my lvl 25..

Heh, I found that on www.cosplay.com nice costumes, the one on the left looks the best!

Other interesting things:
- changing controller configuration presets (really hope MW2 has this!!!)
- a game where all skills are useful and will be used by everyone (not just certain ones)
- a character for each play type, but each can basically do pretty good melee still! - system link (less lag!)

- vendor limited-time special products!! (sometimes has legendaries!)
An amazing costume; one more cosplay/anime convention in Toronto this year; Dec 12th I believe at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Dexterity Save

Someone commented about what new people.. and now I can't find where it was.. sorry..

Anyways.. BORDERLANDS!!!!

Moi. The more you use a weapon, your proficiency increases which gives you boosts (increased accuracy, more damage, faster reload). As the soldier class, my special ability is a deployable turret that automatically fires on nearby enemies and can regen health or give ammo..

It makes me cry.
Why?
Is it not like all the reviews who say it's Diablo-esque?
Oh yes... its freaking super addictive like Diablo.. one of the most fun games i've played in ages.
Ages.
The problem: Its came out after Halo ODST and before Modern Warfare 2.

Inventory screen, if I ain't moving, i'm looking at this screen; you can have up to 4 guns equipped at one time, a shield generator, a grenade mod, class mod (usually boosts your skills)

This game should have come out in August and it would sell so well. Everyone is hungry for a first person shooter; Halo and MW2 isn't out. Everyone would find out how freaking amazing this game was. It would explain how I stayed up till 4 on Friday playing the game ("one more quest.. oh, new gun lets try that.., lets buy some more ammo.. those bandits are shooting at me, i can't hurt their feelings and ignore them") and then forcing myself to stop at 2 last night.

Your skill tree; each lvl after 5, you get 1 skill point and each skill except that big/main one, can have up to 5 points put into it which then unlocks the next tier. All the skills are very useful, some people may use the same load out, but its not like some are stupid.

Its a game you take a sick week for. lol

Quest tracker.. only can have one up at a time.. pretty self explanatory from the screenie.

Sorry, it was really hard to learn, shoot and take pictures at the same time... I couldn't get any firefight pics.. maybe if i set my camera to auto shoot..

One bad thing.. split screen play.. you're shifting your windows like my brother on the right alot. It doesn't fit all in one screen.

A-gazillion guns... they were telling the truth!
I've seen a few games with similar names, I personally didn't check the stats (damage, accuracy, rate of fire, ammo) whether if they were the same.. but those were whites (trash guns) its rare to find the same gun tho. I'm a loot wh0re, so while my brother is killing as a tank (they rock), i'm picking up the ammo, money and trash guns. And then he finds the epic and legendary weapons :P

Yet another game that I know only one person with the game to play online..
more about the game coming soon!

Halo Odst Firefight

10k points away from the Firefight: Crater achievement... on solo.. makes me hate the game.

Ahhh Ultima Online... such good memories..

- chopping trees to make bows all the way from Yew to Britain..
- fighting in the Moonglow graveyard with super high respawn and piling bodies of skels
- watching my brother find ore spots in Minoc
- finding a dead body in the forest and looting it of all it's riches!
- accidently looting a body in town and getting insta-killed by guards
- having my own lich as a guard for my tower (they couldn't always open the door)

Poor Warhammer

There are alot less WAR blogs today. Statement.

I think I saw some links of consistent WAR bloggers at Grimnir's.. but its far far less than about 4 months ago.
I guess its natural attrition due to lack of interest in the game, new games and the inability to blog consistently.

I'm very happy for my friend Ryelyn though

She found a nice chaos guild on a combined server where they are very active, friendly (except for some apparently, but you can't avoid that), use vent and frequently do premade sc's, warbands and dungeons.I still crave the whammer battlefield myself and wonder why I stopped.. I think just like before it was my passion to play with my friends in RL.. as fun as it may be to play with other people .. I still derive more pleasure from playing with my friends and being able to talk about it at work (inadvertantly annoying our non-playing coworkers to no ends).

I'm very jealous of my friend Ryelyn. She's got like RR51(**I wrote this a week ago and now she's lvl 55) last night and is using her annihilator set but also has a full darkpromise set as well.. she must look sick (zealot).. kinda like the evil assasin (when are they good? lol) from HellBoy.
Because I kinda got bored with my sorc (40 rr ~36).. I never really got to do the high lvl dungeons nor truly particpate in a daily orvr/premades. I got to pug frequently, get washed away by zergs of order (they would have 4 wbs to our 2) and they were organized while chaos was more greedy and went for objectives instead of keeps and by time we got to the keep, order would be waiting in force.

I won't really talk about what I want to see Mythic do to 'save' warhammer.. granted there is alot less people playing the game than expected, but what mmo really has the numbers that they started off with and more other than wow?

Sure there was end game things that needed improvement, but there were many things I loved about it that you see in new mmos these days:
1. PQs - most fun obviously if done with your friends/guild, worst case scenario other people..- obviously it doesn't work if everyone is in orvr/sc's and its just you *whistles*

I loved the days when we had quite a few close people playing and i'd lead some Sacelleum runs for my friends to have some nice unique gear =)

2. Quest tracker - it tells you the general location of where you're supposed to go, when you click on the map it brings up the quest and it didn't take up the whole screen or stop progess.. there is no decifering of where the quest is or what you have to do, and the quests are fleshed out for those that actually like to read

3. Varied classes and races - each race (now vs launch) has their own archetype (tank, mdps, rdps and hybrid healer) and they each have their own mechanic.. even though the skills may be the same, some tanks will have different abilities even with their class mirror (black orc vs swordmaster) through talents/specialization

4. Living guilds - a reason to have a guild, to run it properly, to be successful; to get rewards, to be better known, for people to see your uber standard, tabards, claimed keeps AND special mounts;
- its not just the extra vault space, but the extras you get from being in the guild, including the very handy recall scroll, to being able to get more rest exp if youre an officer or buying a faster and cooler mount

5. Scenarios diversity - sure the same scenarios did seem to pop more frequently than others (nordenwatch, stonetroll crossing, mourkain temple, serpents passage, tor anroc), but atleast there was a diverse amt per tier.. 3-5 per tier

What were some things that you relished in WAR that other mmos didn't have or incorporated?

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog

Do you like Neil Patrick Harris? (Harold & Kumar, How I Met your Mother)
Do you like Josh Whedon? (Firefly, Buffy, Angel etc)
Do you like Felicia Day? (The Guild)
Do you like Nathan Fillion? (Firefly, Halo Odst)

Then check this out:

Borderlands is now available!

Woot! Something to last me till Modern Warfare 2! (b/c I doubt Aion will)

Video Games Borderlands Opening Cinematic

XBox 360 Playstation 3 Nintendo Wii

Aion Compliment Sandwich

Something good.. something good.. something good...

Aion has some very scenic views...

Very pretty, but it also seems a bit static.. but I guess thats what scenery is.. static.. :S

Something bad.. you have smelly dog breath..
So besides the grinding that I agree with previous posters.. there is a freaking huge amount of walking back and forth.. I think I hate that more than grinding. One of the last quests had me going to 5/6 different people. First person, it was fast b/c I had to deliver another quest to, and the second person took about 5 minutes pure running, then I had to recall to the next, then it was a 8min run to the next person, another 5 minute run to the next, back to the second person, and then to the original person! Freaking stupidity..

In Aion (as of right now) there is no sprinting skill nor mounts or anything that increases your speed, it makes everything really far apart. Really annoying.

A look at my templar with chain armor

And then with mostly plate (except legs) armor

Aionic Flight

NCsoft always touted flight being a big feature for their game.. and I was always like "meh, its been done in WoW.. how good can it be?" Granted I never had a flying mount in WoW.. flying in Aion is something different.

No cooldown.. limited time to fly.. and gliding..
My first attempt at flying resulted in me running out of flying time and dropping to my death.. lol. Fyi: gliding counts as flying, it just doesn't drain at as fast a rate. One might want to change it so shift+R/shift+F toggles flight.. instead of having to click on the icon or having to press PgUp/PgDn.

One thing; you would think that if you pressed W to go forward to gain momentum, if you pressed S (backwards) that you would pull up and gain altitude... nope..
I saw a trainer that gives more flight time.. i dunno what +100 means... but I do know what 12 Million kinah means (unattainable for a casual player! :P)

Aion does have an asian-ey or Final Fantasy feel.. I kinda like it; its different..

Looks like they spent alot more time designing their buildings compared to some other games.

I figured out how to turn off the user interface (F12)

Pretty sweet view... i want to take out those dinosaurs!

Tale of One MMO

So after reading so many good blogs, I finally cracked and decided to buy Fallen Earth. As fate would have it though... they were out of stock (the EB guy kinda laughed at me..).. but they did have Aion.

Does everyone have their review of it already by now? Yes I think so. Some things I noticed about the game:

Body sizes/height.. doesn't make sense

Why in the world do you have really small people and then really huge people? That is the super small body next to me, and the biggest body is nearly 3 heads taller than my guy. What kind of lore is there that has such small and huge people? The small people have the advantage of being able to hide behind people much much easier.. (but really who wants to be so small? its ugly small)

Gathering rocks... or atleast its interesting

A window pops up like you see, and depending on your skill, you slowly succeed or fail at the gathering. If you critically succeed the bar fills up more, and it seems like the higher your gathering skill, the more the bar fills up, and the less the fail bar fills up. I haven't seen a critical fail yet.

The ability to buy skills ahead of time.

Freaking amazing; I hated how I would be missing skills if I was away from town for a long time. Now you buy it ahead of time (if you have the money) and then use the book in your inventory to learn it when you get that lvl. And all your other skills naturally gain in potency automatically when you lvl.

Simple cool things

Its raining.. and my avatar doesn't want to mess his hairdo' so he gets a leaf to cover himself... smart.

Bad bad thing

I was greeted to the game with the normal chat to this... mannn alive. NCsoft has to do something about those goldsellers and spammers.. thats nasssty. It just keeps coming. I hope unlike WAR that they don't save your chatlog on your harddrive (didn't know that? check) I really wish there was a way to turn off all these spammers.. sooo annoying.. I literally put myself on the combat log so i can avoid looking at all this spamming.

It'll make you a sad panda.

Mini Ninjas Second Review

So a week later.. I finished it.

I understand now why the game was getting higher than expected marks in reviews: is actually pretty good. I feel that now that i've played the game fully I can review it with full honesty. By the way with the new FTC decision.. I don't think that would affect me b/c i'm Canadian :P

Good:

Different Graphics and artwork
- it feels like you're in a disney/pixar movie which is a good thing and refreshing too
- if you have the chance, stop what you're doing and just look around.. people spent alot of time to create this game.. its rather beautiful

6 different characters with 6 different vignettes and abilities
- do you like using magic to rain destruction on your foes? use Hiro. Do you like to snipe at them from afar, use Shun. Do you like using a spear? Use Shizume.
- you can't use each character all the time; sometimes you can't jump up a ledge without using a bigger character; so if you use a smaller character Tora, you slip down
- each character has a unique special attack which makes sense

Unique ways to down Bosses
- if you don't figure it out yourself, they give you a small hint (ie. "try sneaking behind the boss")
- even though you have to figure it out, its a rather logical solution

Multiple solutions to maps
- i hate linearity (sp?).. MNs lets you take the Rambo approach and just mess everyone up, or you can be totally stealthy, take the side way in, crawl on the ceilings or roofs.. granted its hard to stealth the whole way, its nice to see you don't have to do it the same way each time

Not so Good:
Travelling on water
- i don't like the physics of floating on water.. just in general.. like if you had too much momentum, you'd fly right into the rocks.. or obviously it takes a while to get alot of momentum from the start (tho some characters seem to gain it faster than others)

Nausea
- for those with weak stomachs, it make make you sick; it has a quick moving camera angle, that doesn't always make sense;
- to regain life, you can knock fruit out of trees or bushes by pressing 'A' rapidly; i would recommend you closing your eyes when you do that as it shakes your screen too

My controller
- it really sucks when you're trying to stand still in the bushes and your controller makes you creep forward b/c its a bit mesed up

Final Thoughts:
So it was a surprise hit with me. The replayability is.. not bad; you'll want to go back and get all the unlocks or try to play a lvl more stealthy (b/c i know we're all gonna just kill kill kill). If you go through doing a completionist way, it'll last you a nice 8-10 hrs (after the second boss I just decided to fly through and demolish anything in my way). Its single player... sooo... yea.. a bit disappointed with that. Vignettes are really cool and rewarding.

I have more achievements and thats all that matters for this unlock addict ;)
It makes me a happy panda

TGIF

Yet another work week passes without me going insane and telling a merchant off... tgif.
Some nice vignettes that unlock when you progress in Mini Ninjas =)

Video Games Mini Ninjas Exclusive Shun Hero Trailer

XBox 360 Playstation 3 Nintendo Wii

Video Games Mini Ninjas Tora Hero Trailer

XBox 360 Playstation 3 Nintendo Wii

Boycott this!

From Ctrl+Alt+Del:

Wouldn't it be nice if blogger posted the original size of this?? yes... yes it would..

Quite a few people have already blogged about this; I agree with Tim (from the comic) about how sad it'll be when all those boycotters go and buy the game still.

Not enough time to elaborate (ie. rant).. so busy these days..

Mini Ninja Lite-review

Well, I tried modifying the layout of the blog yesterday, and just like the time before, I ended up extremely frustrated. I realize why I changed my major in university from IT to business... I suck at programming! Oh well.. I'll try again later this week.

So I got this game (Mini Ninjas) the other week and only got the chance to try it yesterday.. i've been occupying myself with ODST and Marvel 2 (I demand more unlocks!)

I thought (but really hoped it wasn't) it was gonna be one of those Lego StarWars/Batman/IndianJones clones and it would soon be collecting dust... but I was very surprised it wasn't. Word of note though: its only single player. My gf thought this was a multiplayer game so we could play together.. nope.

The graphics are great and immersive.. there are those invisible walls, but most of them make sense.. like actual cliff walls, castle walls, or very thick bamboo. My brother commented on how the frame rate was very smooth.. its a pretty game.. it'll remind you of a Pixar movie. Which leads me to the thing that endeared me most to this game (besides the unlocks.. lol):

Vignettes of each character; there are like 5 different characters with their own cute backstory which is normally unlocked via saving\meeting them in the actual game. There was one character Futo a big burly ninja that was gonna be relegated to dishwashing b/c he was too big and clumsy to use normal ninja weapons, but the main character thought of a solution: a big @ss hammer. It shows how the main character and Futo become best friends: Futo is sleeping by the fire and the main character pulls his cover over him to keep him warm.... awww <3

Running out of time.. so favorite part so far: having enemies chase me into a small bush and they suddenly can't find you, and you're free to sneak attack them to your heart's content!

Bottom line: its a good game, but i'm quite sure most of my readers aren't into this kind of game, but this game is suprisingly entertaining still (you can be as rambo or as stealthy as you like); its probably a renter though.