Oh yes, it does say Super Skills. So of course we weren’t even thinking we could emulate such glorious tactics. My husband and I are hard-core gamers. We’re fairly good at games, and we play together a lot. And we do know that for Mario games, you know you need the skills to time everything just right, or watch Mario and Luigi fall down into an abyss.
I thought we were prepared. The reviews said it was a good fun game for all the family (presumably because it’s a Mario title) so my husband felt it’d be a fun evening thing to do for us. How very wrong we were…
1) No classic controllers allowed – I prefer having those controllers as opposed to just the Wiimote. It’s prohibited.
2) Jumping off each other’s part of the game – fine, but don’t respawn us one on top of the other so there’s suddenly an unintended jump into the jaws of death.
3) Continues are infinite – so why bother giving us lives at all?
4) Why are the levels so damn hard?
Granted, we’re not used to timing our jumps to perfection, but this is ridiculous! Even Super Mario Sunshine was better than this (and that’s saying something)!
Now is this just us or has anyone else feel incredibly frustrated with this game? Just to work off this annoyance before bedtime (after all, I don’t want dreams that involve jumping onto blocks and avoiding spikes), I’m prepared to go kick some unfortunate people’s bums in PvP.
Nine Dragons is a MMO from Japan, played and downloadable for free. Something I’ve had my eye on since it was first announced (it was hyped, and it apparently is playable in both China and Korea too). So here I am downloading for the past half hour (only 10%) to see if I’d get to have a go on it. I’ve had troubles from Japan-based MMOs before, so I’ll have to see how things go. Here’s one of the PV trailers available on YouTube:
The first impression that Age of Conan gives is pretty positive. For the last week, any other games I’ve been playing has been put on hold, and I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in the world where Conan’s king.
Like any MMO, choose and customize your character, but the starting place up until you’re about level 20 is in the Barachan isles, more specifically around the town of Tortage. You were shipwrecked, and have no idea of who you were… so the story goes that by playing, you find out more about yourself. During the time spent around Tortage, you can set yourself to play Night (single player only) or Day (multi-player). Level 20 is when you can get yourself a gathering skill, level 40 when you can learn to make things. Just bear in mind though that you will have to travel quite a ways in some areas to get to where the professional trainers are.
The interface is pretty easy to get used to, especially if you’ve been playing other MMOs like LOTROnline or WoW. Mobs will give up on you if you zone out or you run far enough away, WASD are the directional keys… But there are a few differences that make this game refreshing:
1) Climbing – surprising that none of the MMOs I’ve come across so far has had this feature. But here it is. You can climb vines, walls, ladders… as long as your skill in climbing matches the skill in whatever you’re trying to climb.
2) Succubus – we’ve said this all along, and I’m so glad someone’s noticed. Warlocks in WoW can summon a succubus, but it always got to us that whether your character was male or female, the resulting minion was always female. In AOC, if you have a female character, your minion is male! And vice versa.
3) Traders – they are both a bank and auction house. Yes, you can store items in there, but should you wish to sell things, right click and set your price. The price can be changed at any time without additional cost. (Lowest currency is Tin, then Copper, Silver, Gold.)
4) Cooldowns – Path of Asura (HearthStone function) has half an hour, potions have 60secs. Either way, half the time of WoW items, which helps a lot!
5) PVP – Guilds can build their own town, their own buildings etc., and these can give rise to PVP action. Pretty cool idea.
6) Quest – whichever quests you choose, you will always know where to go. Follow the arrows and you can’t go wrong.
7) Instances – you can choose Normal or Epic mode. Either way, you do not need to party up before entering, and most missions can be done on your own.
No doubt I’ll be playing this MMO for a while to come.
Excuse my lapse for the last week or so. Ordered myself some games last week, they arrived, and I’ve been spending most of my time with one – The Lord of the Rings Online. It’s like a mixture of WoW, Vanguard and a bit of Oblivion mixed in for good measure. The basic manoeuvers are the same as WoW, although quest-related NPCs are marked with a yellow ring overhead (and on mini-map) to make it user-friendly for players finding them. The graphics resemble Oblivion in that it’s detailed but not so overly, and the characters look realistic enough. You can play as one of four races: Man, Dwarf, Elf or Hobbit (though Dwarf is only playable as male), with seven differing classes to choose from (5 characters are permitted per server). Each have their own stories along which your quest choices differ, as does some part of your location. The ‘Vanguard‘ bit is the crafting side – the professions. Fortunately, it’s not as complicated as that half-finished game, which made crafting so very laborious. Just a bit detailed: you have to be at a specific workbench/forge/oven/field to start the process, and have the right tools equipped.
While I’ve been trying this rather new fancy game obviously, my WoW time has suffered… so I apologise to friends and guilds alike. And if you’re a fan of any other games mentioned above, give this one a try. For your info, most of the quests at the beginner stages (only played one of mine ’til level 12 so far however) are solo-able, even those marked as a ‘fellowship’ q. So even if you don’t know anyone else there, not a hard job at levelling :)
A new Zelda game for the DS is coming out 23rd June for approx. £24. The days when you moved Link via ‘trial and error’ method is almost over, as now the map can be drawn on with places of interest and ways to go around certain areas. So, Link doesn’t have to die too often :)
DK Barrel Jet Race is out 28th June for £29 on Wii. The classic moves of DK is available in the forms of throwing various barrels at your opponents. According to the article, the Wii remote makes it all so much fun.
For £20, and coming out in August is a collaboration between Sega and two other firms: 音声感情測定器ココロスキャン – which roughly translates to ‘Mind Scan’. How? By talking into the DS mic using Sensibility Technology. Know your mood, what you may be feeling etc. What use would it be? Apparently by taking your DS into the conference room, you’ll know if your colleagues are interested in such and such a project or not. More than likely, if people suspect the use of such things, they might become one extreme of another of those ‘moods’ that the software can detect.
Lastly, a DS game currently out for £18 or so, might be nostalgic for some, but aggravating for others. Rubik’s Cube. In all sizes. Puzzle game obviously. For up to 4 players, battle other players in how fast or how much you can solve the puzzles. Fortunately the mini-game option does allow other less stressful puzzles.
We finally got a Wii a few days back, and no, didn’t have to pay an extortionate amount for that. The first day of playing brought forth muscle ache the next day – must be the unusual ways in which you have to move that controller sometimes. Still, when Elebits comes out, I’ll be waiting with controller in hand, ache or no ache.
Along with the Wii, my betrothed got me Puzzle Quest for the DS. Here’s some screenshots for people who don’t know what it is. It’s fairly simple: you solve puzzles to defeat bosses, forge items, research your mount, research spells, and capture creatures. Pretty addictive, to the point that my character is now a level 26 after about 2 solid days of playing. It’s not often that I find games that are good enough to keep me playing so continuously.
But… and there is a ‘but’, as with any game that has been rushed out onto any platform, and worldwide at that, there are some bugs you may encounter during gameplay. No other reviews online seem to mention any of these, so maybe people haven’t played enough of it to discover them, but they have managed to annoy me a wee bit too much.
1) Screen scrolls interminably downwards… to stop in the middle of a sea on map section. It happens most often when I’ve been playing it for a couple of hours, and if I try to scroll back up, it just rolls back down again. So reset time. After reset, you may notice that the last few matches may not have been saved, and you do end up doing it all again (frustrating if it was one hell of a battle).
2) Someone reviewed that dialogues have glitches, as in it doesn’t show properly occasionally. I haven’t had a problem with that, but during the battles, I’ve had what was supposed to be ‘4 of a kind’ or ‘5 of a kind’ come up in some weird blurred out incomprehensible yellow glyphs. Again, reset does help, but save point might be a bit boggled.
As they seem to happen every few hours, it hasn’t improved my temperament of late. So, if you’re the type of gamer who gets irritated at the mere mention of a ‘bug’, this game’s not for you. On the other hand, you’re used to ‘bugs’ and like playing puzzles of the Zookeeper or Bejeweled type, this game is a must for you – you won’t have a life for a while after this though :p
Unconfirmed, but definitely rumoured, due to a very shoddily written article. Bone was one hell of a series. I even dreamt of the Red Dragon and the Rat Creatures, and have almost promised myself that once I own a pet, it shall be called Bartleby (I’ll even take a cuddly version of that cuteness!). That’s how influential and brilliant those comic books are. The Telltale games forum do not confirm this piece of news, but yes, it’d be cool :)
My mother often reminds me, it is admirable that people think about learning other languages, and I ought to be more understanding of such struggles. I am, to a certain extent. It was no easy task for me to learn the basics of Latin and Ancient Greek, and I do have to constantly go back to the basic grammars, seeing that those two languages are definitely ‘dead’ in daily life (of course, unless one runs into the law in one way or another, even the term habeas corpus won’t mean much). But as for the methods involved in the learning of languages… well, I have opinions, as you may have noticed. So another software like もっとえいご漬け (this one for the DS), teaching the player to learn better English usually gets me annoyed, to say the least. Being ‘more soaked in English’ (as the above Japanese blurb translates to) might be the better way, but as it’s not literal, it’s a moot point. I’m sure my views will change a bit if I knew Japanese people would go and talk to foreigners lost in Tokyo and help them out with whatever skill they have, but as that doesn’t happen (many a time I went up to stranded foreigners to help them out, usually to locate the Sony building), I really don’t think all this training is working at all. And anyhoo, if these softwares are so helpful, why can’t they make one for English speakers to learn Japanese? Afterall, the machines can work both ways.
It’s been announced that for the Wii Virtual Console, 4 more companies has agreed to put their games up. And NeoGeo has also agreed from this summer, though their titles are yet to be confirmed. This should make some fans happy. For now, such titles as Yoshi’s Egg (Famicon), Goemon (Super Famicon), Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64) are coming out around March.
A new RPG for Xbox360 is coming out in Japan, and boasts ‘a new feel’ to it (14th June, approx. £37). Titled Trustybell: Chopin’s Dream, it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to come out of Japan – an anime version of the last dreams of a famous romanticised composer. There’s a little boy who does a Robin Hood to feed the poor, and a girl whose fate is sent awry by a gem called Trusty. I did read the 3-page article, but failed to grasp what it boasted about. Still, the screenshots should at least get some attention from the fans of gothic lolita…
19th April on Wii for approx. £29 is the long awaited Paper Mario. The story goes that an even more of a baddy than that Bowser comes along and swallows all but Mario into a vortex. When Peach comes to, she finds herself in the middle of a wedding between her and Bowser – the wedding organized by this stranger. Mind, Bowser’s kid in Super Mario Sunshine called Peach his ‘mommy’, so what’s going on here?
FF XII finally came out here today, so my other half went trundling off to Oxford Street to get it. He says the queues were huge, and there were even some embarassing cosplay type people too. Well, we’ve got it now, so more games to split my time between :)
After complications in downloading the patch the last two days (many people seem to have the exact same problem – download the latest version of Direct X or else!), I’ve finally been able to play Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Another MMORPG as may be, it does seem to have some promise. It’s out 30th Jan. (in the UK at least) for £17.99 according to Play.com (Amazon doesn’t even stock it. somehow when you type the product name, it comes up with The Burning Crusade…).
The opening screen… is uncannily similar to WoW as is most of the game – in that sense, it’s very playable for me (I spend probably more than 15hours on WoW a week). But the characters are more in-depth – probably a lot more realistic looking than the comic-based looks from WoW, and the scenery – it’s really good. The details are more in line with Guild Wars though you don’t get the gay ‘every bit outside town is an instance’ thing here (that really put us off playing for good). The music’s soothing in an ambient kind of way too (or down right classical), but I kept having a deja vu of sorts – the elf starting place in WoW (Teldrassil) and some of the starting areas in VG kind of look similar to me. Of course, what with this being a Beta and the fact I’ve only been playing it the last couple of hours (and not having seen much of the continent), the comparisons to WoW may be uncalled for. But it’s there to illustrate my point – how playable this seems to be. Of course, as soon as you get used to the way your character moves, etc.
There are little problems, as any games would. There was even a shouted argument in the chat pannel – it turned out slightly one-sided as one person seemed to be the target of everyone else. But that one unnamed person was right. There does seem to be an awful amount of bugs (patching took well over 9hours, not to mention that Direct X problem which wasn’t highlighted until today), and a respawn rate of mobs from bloody awful (several players gathered in one spot trying to find a mob needed for quest) to a fastness that resembled popcorn (several players were killed due to ultra fast respawn rate in one area). I realise that there would be problems, especially in Beta stage, but yes, there certainly seems to be a lot going wrong. The Quest log does tell you where to go – or which direction to go to – but it doesn’t give you a detailed map of an area… so you could be wandering in the general vicinity for a while.
I can quite complaining though – every quest I finish, I get to leave feedback on, so maybe, in a couple of weeks’ time, the problems will be sorted :)
PS I never really thought I’d miss my left thumb, but there we are… I do use it for typing after all. Was dicing some onions last night for curry, and managed to slice a bit of the thumb along with them. Didn’t hurt at the time, but without hourly rests, it does now. Utter stupidity!
Sadly, as is per usual after big patches like this one, most of the WoW realms are down. Those that are not down are currently being battered, figuratively speaking (queues are growing long). As for the patch notes, I did hope to have them down here, but seeing the official site is also down, kind of ruins that a bit. 25 of the realms have been listed as going to be having some more maintenance, so will not be available until 19.00 (game time)… including Arathor. So there goes my plans of battlegrounds…
Quite a few new changes, which is welcome but slightly confusing for some, apparently. Under this new system of LFG/LFM, there’s no relevant channel for it now, and yet, you find quite a few people in general chat/guild recruitment advertising their wares. So until that calms down a bit, we’re in for another of those irritating times when we’re forced to remove ourselves from the entire chat system. Oh, and when you try and join an instance queue, you may just end up not being in a group at all (like the times you may have used the meeting stones). Seriously, saying ‘hi’ then leaving? Why did you flipping join the instance queue in the first place? Or maybe it’s the weird people on those servers I’m on…
One of the leading games magazines in the UK, gamestm really hasn’t learnt any lessons. Back in July, I posted them an email detailing all their dubious translations on their column by a Tim Rogers about a certain ‘Japanese lesson’ that he was writing about. Sadly, I didn’t get any replies – I just wrote to say that seeing they’re trying to teach my language to others, would they kindly stop mangling it much – reasonable, I thought, especially considering I pointed out which bits needed amendments.
Well, they’ve done it again, unsurprisingly. In one of the examples I read today (standing in WHSmith… no, I’m not buying a magazine that snubs such a well-intentioned email), they had inserted a phrase ‘janaissuyo’… which in proper (formal) Japanese would be rendered as ‘janaidesuyo’, and means ‘it is not’. To me, this is sacrilegious, almost. It’s like teaching some Japanese kids (in one of those jukus over there) to say ‘eh up, me duck’ instead of ‘how are you?’ or ‘hi’ or something more simple and in keeping with the general language rather than a somewhat weird localization. Or what about teaching some kids to say ‘och, aye’ (in proper Glaswegian accent, mind!) instead of ‘oh yes’ and such. Although ‘janaissuyo’ is not a particular localized phrase, it is nonetheless something that no self-respecting language teacher would tell his/her students, seeing that ‘lower’ form of language is considered somewhat like the Cockney accent, famous of London. Tsk, tsk… do your research if you’re going to have it published!
In all the Japanese sites today, the pages are filled with ‘how many lined up at which store in which city’ for the much awaited PS3 launch. Apparently, the queues were nearly as bad as that of the DSLites earlier this year, and most stores were sold out way before closing time. Ah the ever patriotic Japanese… :)
And WoW: Burning Crusade is due out January 16th next year, though as regards the Collector’s Edition, neither amazon nor play.com seem to have any signs of ‘pre-ordering’ as of yet. At least it’s not too long a wait now.
On E4 last night (11pm), they showed a BAFTA for games. “Games are increasingly becoming mainstream” and hence, they felt that doing such award ceremonies (sponsored by PCWorld) was positive. Yeah, right. We watched it, and no justice to games was done whatsoever.
How many times did we hear “Games are for geeks” kind of commentary! Surely the successes of Nintendogs, Animal Crossing and many MMORPGs got so many girls interested in gaming itself? But no, none of these ever got even a mention. Oh hang on… the only online game to get a mention and an award for Best Online category was Dungeons & Dragons… good, but hardly the best, according to gamers. And would you vote Ghost Recon as the Best Game?
No, this whole “we are open to gaming and gamers” farce was sheer perpetration of aggressive marketing and nothing more. How very disappointing that games do not yet get the recognition they deserve in this country.
