EVE noobs: losing your first ship

I lost my first ship in EVE tonight.

Yeah, I’ve been playing for a few weeks, but don’t for a second think it’s taken me this long to lose a ship due to any skill on my part. It took me this long because I don’t play much and when I do I’ve been puttering around in 1.0 space mining and junk. And this ship, to my eternal shame, was lost in a PvE Tutorial mission!

Anyway, here’s what I learned, so other EVE noobs won’t be as surprised as I was:

1) Insurance, even Platinum Insurance, isn’t going to get you a new ship. My little frigate was fully insured. Problem was that no one was selling a replacement for what the insurance company thought it was worth. So just like in real life, you’re going to have to have cash on hand to make up the difference between your insurance payout and the street cost of a new ship.

2) That said, newbie ships, at least, are pretty cheap. Don’t panic when yours goes boom! You’ll be back on your feet in no time.

3) Do shop around. By traveling 3 jumps (all through 1.0 space…I think I could’ve flown my pod but I didn’t) I saved about 40% of the cost of my replacement ship. Yes, and still the insurance payout wasn’t enough. At my local station, the ship I was replacing was going for more than twice the insurance payout.

4) Be prepared to refit. I had plenty of weapons and afterburners and stuff; but I had no ammo! Not a single slug. I had more than I could ever use in the ship I lost. So in future I’ll remember to carry only as much ammo as I’ll need for the mission at hand. Not that noob ammo is all that expensive but it’s just so wasteful losing so much to the void…

Hmmm, it just occurred to me… I wonder if I could’ve flown back out to my own wreck and salvaged from it? Does anyone know?

Patchwork Heroes

Patchwork Heroes for the PSP launched today. I haven’t played it, but I did play the demo a couple weeks back, and I have to say it’s worth at least trying. It’s one of those weird, quirky games that just feels right on a handheld.

So here’s the premise. You’re a tiny team of 2D heroes fighting off big 2D airships in order to defend your town. Your only weapon? Saws! The idea is that you cut chunks off the airships (by holding down a button and running, but the saws only work for a few seconds then they need a brief recharge), getting points depending on how big a chunk you cut off in a single piece. You’ll also find some of your friends are captive on the deck of the airships, so you need to save them (before you cut off the area of the ship they’re on). The air ships have gun emplacements, so you’ll be dodging incoming fire, and past the earliest levels there are repair units that will patch up the cuts you made.

And that’s really it. Oh, and there’s a time limit. Don’t cut up enough of the ship fast enough and it will bomb your village into rubble. Which leads me to a another strange facet. So you’re like 4 pixels tall, and you travel in a group of friends. If you get hit my gunfire, one of your friends will die and up pops a message that says something like “Billy Died, Age 14” {going from memory, as I said I played it a while ago}. That weird little pop-up makes the game feel personal. These aren’t little blobs of pixels, they’re kids! You can’t squander their lives!

The gameplay scratches that lizard-brain itch that loves popping bubblewrap, peeling and shredding the label off your bottle of beer, or (more directly) taking a piece of paper and a pair of scissors and just clipping it into little pieces.

The full game is only $10 but again, I urge you to try the demo first, because it’s a really weird game, and honestly I found it pretty challenging.

Sony gets down and dirty

This made me chuckle.

Look, I know there was immediate internet hate directed at Sony when they announced the Move. *waves hand dismissively* Whatever dudes, let’s wait until we see release hardware and software before we decide. I’m not a huge fan of “waggle” gameplay, but I am a huge fan of “pointing” gameplay and split controllers. Playing point and click-ish games on the Wii, stuff like Harvest Moon, is really comfortable for me. So I’ll probably at least give Move a try.

Anyway, didn’t mean to go on about it. I’m just loving Sony’s marketing department these days. Remember the creepy crying baby and stuff that we used to get for ads? Kevin Butler is so much simpler, more entertaining and, I think, effective.

3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)

Playstation blog has a post up with a couple of videos of this retro celebratory May 11th release. “All your childhood on a single disk.” as Atlus’s Aram Jabbari says. Well, he says something close to that anyway.

I love Atlus PR’s sense of humor. Heck I just kinda love Atlus all-around.

The video focuses on gameplay, but you need to read an earlier post on how the game lets you heavily customize the hero you play as.

It’s all about the retro, including the price, thankfully ($40). I’m looking forward to playing this one.

Weekend recap

I realized it’s been a full week since my last post here at Dragonchasers. In an attempt to convince my 4 readers not to ditch this RSS feed, I figured I’d share what my gaming’s been looking like recently.

Life has been super-busy lately, leaving not too much time for gaming. While I lament that fact often, the truth is that with scarcity comes value. When I *do* get to relax and play a game, I’m really enjoying myself.

My experiment in EVE continues. I’m *still* on my trial account but plan on switching over to a paying account when it finally runs out. I’m still learning a ton of new things in every play session, as infrequent as they are. I’ve gotten sucked into that mindset that thinks it’s ok to pay $15/month to log into a game once or twice a week since my character is still learning even when I can’t play. That’s a bit of genius on the part of CCP! Yesterday I finally went through an entire tutorial mission sequence (yes, I’m very much still doing the bidding of the Civilian/Tutorial agents), culminating in a rather difficult assignment to take a particularly irksome pirate. I limped home with 15% hull integrity and my pulse racing. So now I’m hooked.

Last Tuesday I started playing FF XIII; this seems to be a divisive title. Some people love it, others hate it. My feelings toward the game have been following a sin wave. I loved it at first, then started getting down on it, but now the love is coming back. Once the spectacle of the graphics and sounds wore off I was a bit bored with gameplay, but finally I’m getting new options and have hit some challenging bits. And I’ve found this isn’t the kind of game I can sit down and play for marathon sessions. I like it the most when I play for about an hour (which means I’ll be playing it for a *long* time). Happily save points are frequent enough that I can do that. (Can you believe some folks are upset with the frequency of Save Points? Considering they function as Shops and Workbenches as well as places to save, that seems…well… dumb. If you don’t want to use one, just go past it.)

Lastly I continue to struggle with Echo Bazaar. Or rather, Echo Bazaar continues to struggle with me. This is a wonderfully written web-based grind-fest. The problem seems to be that it is a victim of its own success. The site is glacially slow most of the time, turning a delightful little diversion into an exercise in frustration. And yet I keep going back to it to see what new Opportunities have arisen. Someone needs to write a book based in Fallen London!

And that’s about all of my gaming for the past week! Sad, no?

But PAX East is coming the weekend after next and I’m taking off a few days around it. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up on my gaming then. As for catching up on my blogging? I’m not sure when I’ll find time for that! Thanks for sticking around, though!

Flotilla?

Just a really quick post before bed. Playing EVE and STO has me thinking a lot about space battles. I’m still looking for a Honor Harrington space combat simulation, y’know?

I just came across Flotilla from BlendoGames, an Indie game dev. I have *not* played the game yet. But based on this video, I’ll definitely be giving the game a try. I know some of my friends out there are also space grognards so I figured I’d better share the link asap. Besides posting about it is the best way to be sure I remember to try it myself! 🙂

The EVE rite of noobness passage

Stargrace is the first one I heard use the term “Nomadic Gamer” and I’ve decided I like that a lot more than “MMO Tourist.” Tourist to me has a negative connotation. You can travel a lot, visit many places and as long as you show some respect for the people, places & cultures you’re visiting, you won’t be considered a tourist.

[I should point out that I grew up in a summer resort so I may have a more negative reaction to the word “tourists” (which in my family was *always* preceded by the word “damned”) than most.]

Anyway, dissembling out of the way, I’ve decided to follow Stargrace and Petter into EVE. This is not technically my first visit; I played back when the game first launched, and once, very briefly, since. But I kept hearing about how the game had changed.

Now I was always an enthusiastic EVE Observer; I loved reading the stories about wars and scams and deals that went down in the game. But I assumed there was no place for someone like me; someone not willing to commit to playing a single MMO as his main leisure time activity. But Stargrace convinced me otherwise; or at least convinced me enough to give the game a try. A *generous* 21-day trial (as long as a current player invites you) really helped in this decision. I’d heard the horror stories of the steep learning curve and knew that if I tried to force myself to learn the basics of the game in a short time I’d walk away in disgust. [Darkfall’s $1, 7-day trial leaves a bitter taste in my mouth after learning of EVE’s free 21-day trial.]

I’ve been taking things very slowly indeed. Two challenges I face: 1) there’s a lot to learn that isn’t at all obvious (as Blue Kae pointed out to me…prior MMO know-how isn’t very useful here) and after a long day of coding and writing for my two jobs, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about stuffing more content into my tired brain. And 2) laugh if you will, but EVE is the only PC game I’ve played that makes me put on my reading glasses. Even with the on-screen font bumped up to 12 pt, wide (the max it will go), I can’t read it without glasses. Which means I have to lean forward to play so that the glasses will focus on the screen. Silly, but it means my eyes tire very quickly while playing. I’m hoping this eases up some when I’m not reading tutorials constantly.

But I started Thursday night, and this morning I hit that point that every EVE ultra-noob eventually comes to:

Yes, I’m doing the Mining Tutorial! With this new-found knowledge, the world galaxy is my oyster!

Kidding aside, figuring things out and learning a game that’s so markedly different is turning out to be a heck of a lot of fun, as long as I go at my own pace. It really, *really* helps to have a group of folks willing to offer help and advice when I get lost. Petter formed a little Corps that has a nice handful of Twitter/Buzz/Blogger types in it, and that helps a bunch too. Nice to have a channel where I can ask dumb questions and not be (maliciously, at least!) laughed at.

Now I guess I need to go track down the EVEMon program and see what that’s all about. Until the next green pasture of MMO goodness beckons, I’ll see you Nomads in EVE!

Blur multiplayer first impressions

A week or so back I got an invite to a “secret Xbox beta” via Fileplanet. Turns out it was for Bizarre Creation’s Blur, the upcoming combat-racing game. I’ve spent the last few evenings playing and I’m surprised at how much fun I’m having in a multiplayer XBox Live game with a bunch of strangers (the beta is mp only).

Starting Monday, March 8th, the beta will open to a much bigger group of testers. You can get keys from a raft of different gaming blogs if you’re quick. They seem to run out fast once they put them up for grabs. Snag one if you can and if you have any interest at all in arcade racing.

So when you start the beta, you’re a level 1 racer with access to two lobbies. One of them is for races of 2-10 players and the other is for races of 4-20 players. The second one has been more or less deserted and there may be other differences besides number of players; different tracks perhaps? I’ve only been in there once (the beta is really small…last night when I was playing, there were 30 players logged into the beta, all of them in Lobby 1).

So you get into this lobby. As a level 1 racer you start with a couple of basic cars. Cars (all licensed, by the way) are divided in classes, A-D. IIRC you started with 1 class D and 1 class C car. Once the prior race is finished there’s a short voting session where players vote for which of two tracks to race on. Each track will allow a specific class of car.

After the voting there’s a 30 second countdown to the race; it’ll feel too long for you at level 1, but later you’ll use this time to switch out cars and mods. At level 1 you have no choices so just sit tight. Soon enough you’re transported to the track.

The actual racing is (so far at least) all done on tracks with several routes/shortcuts on them. There’re various power-ups scattered around. Shields, mines, missiles and the like. These all feel pretty good and many of them can be fired forward or backward. Honestly the racing feels a lot like a cart-racer with a more grown-up ambiance. As I said, cars are licensed and realistic looking. The driving model feels slightly more realistic than that of a cart racer but it is still very drifty with an emphasis on accessibility; this is not a racing sim!

Hitting other players with weapons tends to slow them down or turn them around. Each car has a health-bar and if you get hit too many times you’ll wreck. Wrecking just means you lose a couple seconds before you respawn. There are “Repair” powerups that will replenish your car’s “health.” Rather than having a “rubber band” effect in the game, there’s a lightning powerup that will drop columns of lightning in front of the race leaders, no matter where you are when you trigger it. If the leaders can’t avoid these it’ll slow them down and let the pack catch up. It’s a nice ‘fair’ mechanic aimed at keeping races tense.

The overall goal of the game is to gain Fans. Fans are the “experience points” of Blur. You get Fans from placing in the race, but you can also get them from hitting other players with weapons, clean laps, good drifting and a host of other things. If you’ve played Project Gotham Racing, swap in “Fans” for “Kudos” and you’ll get the idea.

After the race, you’ll learn how many Fans you’ve earned and see how far you’ve gone towards the next racing level. Then it’s back to the lobby to vote on the next track.

It won’t take you many races to level. In two nights (maybe two hours of playing) I’ve reached level 7. The beta has a cap of level 15 but the full game will go to 50. It looks like things slow down past 10. I’ve seen a lot of level 10 racers and not many beyond that.

What makes Blur so fun is that progress-quest itch that you can keep scratching. At level 1 you have a beginner car and beginner player skills. Chances of you placing in a race are pretty slim. But you can still earn a lot of Fans by driving well. I think it took me 2 races to get to level 2.

As you gain levels you’ll earn new cars with better capabilities and more advanced handling models. These are, in theory, harder to drive but much more competitive. Ideally you’ll match car to track… if a track has a lot of dirt you might take a car that’s build for off-road racing… somethink like an SUV. If that track is really twisty you might favor handling and acceleration over top-end speed. Only by learning the tracks will you be able to determine what car to use on which track.

After a few more levels you’ll unlock Mods. Mods come in sets of three and they tweak various things. Some mods give you a power-up at the start of the race. Some let you earn more Fans for good driving. Some improve defense and others improve offense. Sometimes you have to compromise since you can’t mix and match individual Mods; they all come 3-to-a-set.

It looks like the cars themselves can eventually be tweaked/upgraded but I haven’t got that far yet.

Blur feels pretty simple when you start playing it, and honestly it never gets overly complex, but as you learn the tracks and the power-ups you start picking up nuances to the gameplay. Just as an example, there’s a Shunt powerup that fires a relatively slow moving homing ‘missile’ at a player. If you’re targeted there’s a flashing indicator to let you know. You can try to out drive the Shunt by janking around a corner or something, or you can drive straight, let it get almost to you and drop a powerup, or fire one backwards, either of which will negate the Shunt. There’s a powerup that “pulses” around your car, pushing everyone away from you (and probably into an obstalce). The counter to a pulse is popping a Shield powerup. And if you have a Shield and the right mod equipped, the energy from the “pulse” gets turned into something beneficial to you; maybe a weapon that you can immediately fire at the dude who tried to Pulse you.

The game looks great, feels really fun to play, and seems like it’ll have enough “leveling up” to keep players occupied for a good while. Getting into a race is fast and earning Fans always leads to “One more race” syndrome as you try to hit the next milestone. (There are also Challenges to work towards, like “Shunt 50 players” or what-have-you. I haven’t earned any of these yet so not sure what you gain from completing them.)

I had zero interest in Blur and had I known this was what the secret beta was, I never would’ve applied for it. But once I was in it, I figured I should give it a try. Now I find myself budgeting money for the game when it comes out. It’s that fun.

As to other players, I don’t even have a headset hooked up to my XBox. So though I saw the ‘talking’ icons lighting up, I never heard anyone talking (maybe that’s a setting…not sure) and there’s really no reason you’d need to talk to other players. On XBox Live, that’s a huge selling point for me. OTOH, getting a group of friends together to chat and race would be awesome fun, because Blur is full of “Oh sh*t did you SEE THAT!!?” moments as racers pull off awesome moves or narrowly escape terrific crashes.

Here’s a rather long “quick look” from Giant Bomb:

Perfect World Entertainment bringing Forsaken World to NA

Just announced via Twitter, Perfect World is bringing Forsaken World to NA.

You can read the announcement here, or visit the preview site to explore what this new (to us here in NA at least) MMO has to offer.

I’m going to go do my own exploring because, frankly, I’ve never heard of this one. But there’s a Vampire class so it can’t be all bad!