I’m tired today. It’s my own fault, really. I was up too late playing video games (again). Will I never learn?

The only reason this is remotely interesting is because I was playing Guild Wars, a game that came out in 2005. A game that I’ve dutifully purchased every expansion for, yet never really played. I’ve tried to get into Guild Wars over and over again since it launched but it’s never ‘stuck’ with me.

Then this weekend I saw Scopique was playing it and that just sort of put it in my head again. I got to thinking about Guild Wars 2 and that mechanic where accomplishments you achieve in Guild Wars 1 will unlock stuff in Guild Wars 2. So I decided to give it another go.

Before I dove back in, I re-read Rubi Bayer’s excellent piece, Stop telling me how to get to 50 points when I only have 3 over at Massively. I also spent a lot of time using the Wiki to answer questions that came up, and browsed a bunch of Rubi’s other “Flameseeker Chronicles” to stuff my brain full of GW info.

I think every game that’s been on the market for a while needs a Rubi Bayer.

One of the things I learned was that I had a Fire Imp ready to be claimed, thanks to my purchase of one of the expansions. That little dude, while kind of a pain in the arse at times (he attacks any and everything he sees) really made my “party” of me and Koss (the first Hero you get in the Factions Nightfall [thanks for the correction, folks!] campaign) a lot more viable. And a lot more fun. That last time I tried Guild Wars my level 6 ass was being handed to me over and over. The Imp made it better.

Pretty soon I added a Monk henchman to keep me healed up, and I started to read quest texts more carefully, taking note of where they started and mentally assigning them a ‘level’ that way. I started doing a lot better, though I’m still probably spending skill points in dumb ways. But I feel like I’m getting a feel for the game. I got my dude from level 6 to level 10 which (get ready to laugh) is the highest level I’ve reading in Guild Wars.

Everyone has already at least tried Guild Wars, so I won’t go on about it much. But I just found it interesting that, 6 years after my initial purchase, and probably after a dozen false starts over those years, I’m finally enjoying the game.

PS Oh, one question for people who enjoy the game. Is the $10 (iirc) “Optional Missions” pack worth buying? And do I need it now or should I wait until I hit 20?

I don’t even know myself anymore. First I got lured into Champions Online, and now I’ve been playing Vindictus. Once again, I blame Eric. Thank god that kid isn’t a drug dealer or I’d be a wreck. Not only does he have me back playing MMOs, but he has me *gasp* using voice chat and yakking away.

Anyway, if you’ve somehow missed it, Vindictus is an action-MO-RPG. No, I didn’t leave off an “M” by mistake..it isn’t massive. Well, the towns where you shop and craft are massive, but when you’re ready to actually play the game, it’s 4-man instances, similar to how Guild Wars handles it.

So, things I like about Vindictus:

• It has a nice JRPG vibe to it, and I like JRPGs. There’s a sense that there’s a story here, though I’m too low level to have seen most of it.
• It’s very respectful of your time. You hang out in a town, then teleport to a “Battle Quest” where you’ll fight. It takes 10-20 minutes to go through one of these, then you’re back in town. How fast you go through is a function of how much scrounging you want to do (you can break containers to get gold and items if you like) and how many people are in your party.
• It’s fast paced. The actual combat is arcade-style rather than triggered skills and cool downs. Combo attacks, active dodging, stuff like that. A nice change from the more sedate pace of most MMORPGs I play.
• It’s free. You can spend real money but so far I’m not really sure when I’ll get around to doing it. When I do, it’ll probably be for some vanity item rather than on something I need in order to progress.

The first time I played I was asked if I wanted to summon a mentor, or something like that. I did so, and was surprised that an actual player had teleported into my instance. And he was personable and helpful. Most of the time since I’ve been playing solo, but the few times I’ve jumped into other people’s missions I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the community. At worst, people have been silent.

The devs did a good job on removing drama from playing. If you see an item, grab it. Everyone else can grab it too. There’s no worry about loot ninjas or anything along those lines. Maybe I’ve just been lucky but so far Vindictus is dangerously close to turning me into a PUGger.

Last night Eric and I ran through 4 (I think) missions over the course of a couple of hours. Sometimes just him and I, once with a friend of his and once with a couple of strangers. It was all fun, and the game has the monster-pinata thing going on. You kill a boss mob and hope to get something good. If you don’t…well, just re-run the mission and try again!

I dunno if I’ll be playing this for months, but hey, it’s free! No commitment..just fun. Nothing wrong with that!

I’m the first one to bitch and moan at bad customer service, so it’s only fair to also draw attention to good customer service.

Last night playing CO I noted I had 3000+ points to spend in the cash shop. Woot!

Today I was over in STO land, and they were offering a deal on Atari Tokens. I wanted to buy some ST:TOS gizmos so I figured I’d spent some money. I ordered 2000 Atari Tokens.

I jumped into STO and it said I had 3300 tokens. Hmm. I checked paypal to be sure the transaction went through. It had. So I hit customer support. I was going to Open a Ticket when a “Live Chat” box popped up. I decided to try it, and a few seconds later I was IM’ing with Mike G.

One we got through the basics of me proving it was my account we were talking about, we started debugging the problem. He said he could see 2000 tokens being deposited in my account. I asked him why I was seeing the same 3000+ I’d seen last night. We went down the list of obvious things. Blowing away cache, trying a different browser, checking in game. Finally I asked him if they could credit me with 1 token just to see if my balance changed, and he left for a bit to see if that was a possibility.

When he came back I asked if he could see a running balance. He couldn’t, but he could see I’d gotten comped 400 CO points on the 28th and 2000 Atari Tokens today. The way he phrased that gave me pause. I logged into Champions Online and it said I had 5000+ points. Eureka!

It turns out that the free points I get from being a Lifetime Subscriber to CO aren’t usable in Star Trek Online. They’re CO points, not Atari Tokens. I apologized to Mike G for wasting his time; I’d never mentioned my previous balance was all freebie points from another game. He remained patient and helpful through the entire process and was very gracious in the face of my being a bit of a bonehead.

So once again, PBCAK (problem between chair and keyboard) but kudos to Mike G for working the problem (I talked to him for about 40 minutes before I realized my error) and never giving up!

Last night my buddy Eric (who you may know as BlamefulGecko) dragged me out of my self-imposed MMO exile and into Champions Online.

This isn’t the first time I played CO; I played at launch and even have a Lifetime Membership. But as with so many other MMOs I eventually lost interest and moved on to something else. According to the character select screen, it’d been 169 days since I last played my characters and if I recall correctly that was a 1 time log in during a welcome back week or something. Really it’s been since a few months after launch since I seriously played. (I still have my “Hall of Champions” listed over to the right, with some origin stories.)

Eric wanted to show me the new Episodes that Cryptic has been adding (similar to what they’ve done with Star Trek Online) so we did the first one. I probably didn’t get as much out of it as I should have, since I was feeling really clumsy and focused more on how to play than what was going on, but Eric did a great job of narrating the storyline as we played. It was a ton of fun!

Afterwards, Eric put on a fashion show of sorts, showing me his different characters and all the crazy-awesome costumes he’s created for them, including a lot of splashy bits that he’s either earned through playing or bought at the C-Store.

I found myself trying to remember why I’d stopped playing; I really enjoyed my visit to this comic book world. I might have to roll a new character to take through the tutorials and get my bearings that way, though. I’ve got unused points to spend, bags full of junk that I have no idea what to do with, and I was halfway through our play session before I remembered some powers work for as long as you hold down a key (and Eric had to remind me that you could ‘charge’ your travel power).

Everything old is new again, I guess. Thanks Eric!

I’m a few days late with this…been a busy week. But I finished the single player campaign of Crysis 2 Monday night. The stat-tracker in-game says it took me 14 hours, but of course that doesn’t count all the ‘lost’ time that resulted from death and being set back to a checkpoint.

I played on, I guess, ‘normal’ difficulty (2nd of 4 levels) and favored being stealthy and sneaking around for quiet kills. It took me 10 days of calendar time to get through the game. By contrast, a friend at work picked the game up on Thursday and also finished Monday, and he was away for 1 day of the weekend! So for him it was 4 days of calendar time. Which just illustrates that game length means different things to different people, I guess. I have a girlfriend, 2 jobs, and a dog. My friend lives alone, has 1 job and a cat (who doesn’t need walking). He also plays a lot more shooters than I do so was probably more efficient during the time he was playing.

Anyway… Crysis 2: I really enjoyed it. I sent it back to Gamefly today with a bit of regret, and I can imagine buying a copy on sale at some point in the future. It’d be fun to go back and chase collectible objectives and try the game on harder difficulty levels. In fact in some ways I think I might enjoy it more on a replay since I wouldn’t be so focused on story and could relax and enjoy killing alien scum (there were a few levels where I basically stealthed past many bad guys just to get to the next checkpoint so I could see what happened next).

I played some DungeonSiege III last weekend, too, and I suspect I’m liking it more than most people. It’ll probably be the next game I focus on.

So far, the urge to go back to MMOs hasn’t returned. Watching all the fuss about CCP’s cash shop (I guess that’s what it was all about) really reinforced my love for single player gaming. I know if I was caught up in EVE last week I would’ve probably been just as upset as everyone else, and who needs that kind of stress?

Just a PSA to remind you all that Heatwave Interactive’s MMO Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising launches today. I guess there was a headstart program for those who pre-ordered, but I haven’t heard much about what’s going on.

I kind of liked G&H back when Perpetual Entertainment was developing it, but then it died. When Heatwave resurrected it, I liked it again for its old-school charm. But as the beta progressed, Heatwave modernized the game, which was probably a smart marketing move, but it kind of made the whole experience feel a bit too “me too” for my tastes. I liked it when I had to read the quest text in order to figure out where to go, for instance. But then they added a guide system to remove that challenge.

The Estate System sounded pretty interesting, but by the time that rolled around I was drifting away from MMOs and there wasn’t enough there to pull me back in. So I’m sitting out this launch, though I wish Heatwave the very best of luck.

The last time I played, and it was a while ago in beta, the combat engine was still kind of janky. I loved the gladiator’s (the class I was playing) animations when they flowed smoothly, but too often they’d stutter, or you could see models change from animated NPC to corpse. Likewise, in a quest that had me destroying cages, it was jarring to see the model switch abruptly from “intact cage” to “broken cage.” These just seemed like technical rough spots that hadn’t yet been polished out; I’m hoping they have been for launch.

I seem to be forming a pattern here. I liked Rift a lot more in beta, before they made it more marketable and mainstream, and same thing here. Maybe I need to re-sub to Dark Age of Camelot or something. Maybe what’s got me drifting away from MMOs is all the hand holding and lack of challenge?

Anyway, congrats to Heatwave for the launch! And again, here’s hoping the game finds its niche. I’ll come and give it a try eventually, when that MMO itch starts up again!

I mentioned signing up for GameFly last week, and the first game they sent me was Crysis 2 for the PS3. It arrived Thursday when I was tormenting myself with an overnight rental of Duke Nukem Forever. That was OK since it meant I’d have a weekend to get a good start on Crysis 2 in between bouts of Infamous 2.

Let’s skip right to the ending: I never once booted up Infamous 2 (or any other game) over the weekend. Crysis 2 grabbed me by the throat in a way that no game has for quite some time. I put in ~10 hours over the course of the weekend, which is a *huge* amount of time for me. I played until I grew disgusted with myself for wasting so much time playing. And then a few hours later, I was back at it.

So yeah, I really like it. Now it’s time to decide why.

I was really hesitant about the game when friends were saying it was good. First, it’s an FPS and not many of those interest me. Second, you’ve got this NanoSuit which was vaguely off-putting for me. The idea is that it can grant you stealth or extra armor and has a visor for scanning enemies and a lot of other stuff. It seemed like it’d be complicated and claustrophobic. Turns out it was neither.

The game takes place in a New York City under attack, but the devs have really handled this nicely. It was much more reminiscent of Cloverfield than it was 9/11, which I consider to be a good thing. It isn’t open world but the levels tend to be nice and broad (so far at least, I was headed into a tunnel when I quit last night) so you don’t feel like you’re being ushered along a defined path, even if you kind of are.

But I think what really made me love the game is that suit that I’d been so hesitant about. You start out with a Stealth mode, and a while later get Armor mode. This kind of opens up two very different ways of playing. Toggle on Stealth and sneak around to take out enemies quietly, or toggle on Armor and go in guns blazing, able to soak up tons of damage. Both modes deplete energy which recharges once a mode is turned off. I’ve been leaning heavily on stealth and a lot of my kills have been done via sneaking up and pushing R3 for a stealth kill, or using a silenced pistol for a head shot. I make a kill then find a corner to hide it to let the suit recharge.

But, when that gets boring I can switch to armor and just charge in, bullets and grenades flying and chaos ensuing. I do like that style of gaming, but only for brief periods of time. Crysis 2 lets me play the way I want to (so far).

The one potential drawback is that checkpoints can seem pretty far apart when you’re sneaking around (which takes time) and more than once I’ve lost 10-15 minutes of progress when I got killed. I call this a potential drawback because I think run & gun players would take much less time to get through these sections, and in my case the gameplay has been so fun that I didn’t mind re-doing them.

The AI is great. Note that I didn’t say smart. It’s smart enough to be fun and dumb enough to not get overly frustrating. I’m playing on difficulty level 2 of 4 (I started on easiest and it was way too easy). So when you take out a bad guy silently, and someone else comes upon the body, they’ll run to check it out to see if the guy is ok, then start yelling about a man down. During all this time it’s pretty easy for you to take out the newcomer.

On the other hand, if anyone sees you, you’ll start taking fire almost immediately and will have to run for cover. Unless Armor mode is toggled on you’re not going to survive a hail of bullets. If you find cover though, the bad guys are pretty quick to go back to “All clear!” and business as usual. It isn’t realistic but it keeps the pacing of the game fun. Who wants to hide behind a shed for 5 minutes until an AI gets bored and moves on?

Ammo is plentiful, and you can customize your guns on the fly. Add/remove silencers, swap out a laser scope for a sniper scope, and so on. By collecting a kind of in-game currency you can tweak your suit powers, too. Stuff like silencing your footsteps, or adding tracers to all in-coming fire so you can pin-point a source.

The story has me interested, too. You start out as a marine and soon find yourself in this suit, because mistaken for some bad-ass named Prophet and with an entire PMC trying to kill you, and you really have no clue what’s going on. So you the player learns along with you the character as things go from bad to worse and you discover what’s really going on with the plague that you’ve been sent in to contain.

Anyway, I’ve droned on long enough, and plenty of real reviewers have already given Crysis 2 a thumbs up. I’ll just say I concur. I haven’t touched MP yet (and probably won’t) but in my opinion the game is worth it just for the single player campaign. It isn’t a perfect game (I’ve seen a bit of clipping and the odd enemy stuck in geometry) but it’s just damned good fun. Right now the game is $40 on Amazon and I’d say it’s worth buying.

Redbox debuted their game rental service last night (today is the official debut but some games showed up yesterday) and I wanted to do a post about it for ITworld, so I needed to test the service.

Problem is, I’m in the middle of Infamous 2 and just received Crysis 2 from Gamefly, so I didn’t really feel the need to rent a game. Then I saw they had Duke Nukem Forever.

Between the infamously long quasi-development time and the fact that the game has been getting such bad reviews, I was curious about it, but there was no way I was going to pay $60 to sate that curiosity. $2 though? Sure why not.

And guess what? The reviews are right. The game is offensive in all kinds of ways. Some of it you can skip. The much-talked about first scene where you start by first-person pissing into a urinal, for instance, can be skipped. I’ve heard of some other vile things you can do in that bathroom, but I stayed away from the toilets. Other parts you have no control of, such as the implied oral sex being performed on Duke (complete with slurping sounds) as he plays a video game. What makes this section of the game even worse (if that’s even possible) is that the “Holsom Twins” who are performing this service are animated like something dead and brought back from beyond. While you’re hearing bad voice-acting that’s trying to sound titillating, what you’re seeing are a pair of wooden-faced character models staring over your shoulder. It’s like Duke is getting head from a couple of zombies. So even if you’re into 3D animated porn, this isn’t good 3D animated porn.

Anyway, plenty of other reviews have talked about how offensive and misogynistic the game is and I’ll just say I agree with that. Heck, even some of the ‘tips’ that appear during loading screens are offensive. Let’s move on to technical and gameplay issues.

On the 360, loading times are stupidly long and ‘levels’ are stupidly short. There are sections of the game where you spend more time waiting for things to load than you do playing the game. The graphics are sub-par, the jokes are ancient, some of them riffing on stuff like old Schwarzenegger movies such as Commando, and the combat feels really stupid. Generally speaking Duke’s most potent weapon, in the early parts of the game at least, are his fists. While enemies can soak up bullets, 1 punch or melee hit does them in (I’ll admit I was playing on Easy so maybe that skewed things). In too many cases there’s a scripted failure at the end of a sequence.

The shame of it all is that there’s some good stuff here, too. Even in the 90 minutes or so I played, I was exposed to a number of different gameplay styles and mini-games. I found a playable pinball table, for instance. One light puzzle section had me driving a remote-controlled RC Truck in order to push an item out of an inexplicably sealed room. The sequence was illogical as hell, but it was kind of fun. There’s a turret segment early on, and even a section where Duke is shrunk to the size of an action figure and has to drive an RC car around a hotel lobby. None of these aspects are earth-shattering, but they were unexpected and kind of fun. But every time I’d start to enjoy myself, the game would throw another cringe-inducing dick joke at me.

There were even some legitimately funny parts to the game. One section has Duke coming upon a woman stuck in an elevator, and the brakes fail. Duke has to yank on a lever to slow the descent, and all the time the woman is freaking out and shouting at him to pull the damned lever and in this case, at least, the voice talent does a great job of turning this potentially horrific event into something pretty funny (and of course in the end Duke saves the day). Even Angela, who was frowning every time she walked through the room and heard/saw what was going on, chuckled at the elevator scene.

I almost wish Duke Nuken Forever was just relentlessly bad; but seeing these little bits and pieces of what could’ve been a fun and interesting game just makes the vile coating of “twisted 13 year-old-boy fantasy crap” seem even more tragic.

Was it worth $2 to get a glimpse at the train wreck that is Duke Nukem Forever? Well, my curiosity is sated, so I guess it was. But it wasn’t worth much more than that, to me.

* * *

Footnote: “Offensive” is a very subjective term. This game was offensive to me; it might not be to you. I’m not a fan of dick jokes or scatological humor. I’m not a fan of ‘bro’ culture, which Duke seems to be embracing in a twisted way. I am not offended by nudity but am offended by such pure objectification of women. When a female character shows up in a skimpy outfit but is more than just a sexbot (see my post on Hunted, though Duke has me re-thinking it) I’m ok with it, but in Duke the female characters are just sex toys with no other personalities, at least during the parts of the game I saw. When the Holsom Twins aren’t servicing Duke, they’re engaging in a bit of sisterly lesbian foreplay. It all gets tired really, really fast.

Once again I’m riffing off other blogger’s titles. This time Moxie’s.

So I’ve kind of organically slid into a break from MMOs. I’m down to logging into Rift about once every two weeks at this point, generally with Angela who is still dabbling. Otherwise I’ve been playing single-player games.

I wasn’t sure why I’ve stopped being excited by MMOs, really, which lead to some introspection. What is it I’m looking for from my games? I think the answer to that question changes constantly, but here’s what I came up with right now.

Progress. There’re two levels of progress that I enjoy. The first is in-game. Advancing to a new zone, reaching a new level, learning a new skill. Basically ticking off a checkbox from a list. I think that’s a basic ‘itch’ in a lot of people; I’ve known folks who’ll go back and add ‘interrupt-driven tasks’ to their To-Do list after they’ve been completed, just so that they could then check them off.

I’ve had this itch since I was a kid, really. Before there were video games or personal computers, I’d undergo weird projects like re-typing a dictionary or a volume of an encyclopedia. Why? Well, clearly I was a crazy child, and loved the satisfaction of finishing a letter or whatever (in theory…I never got very far on these projects). Plus any excuse to use such a cool gadget as a typewriter…

The bigger Progress is finishing stuff. I love the feeling of satisfaction I get from finishing a game (or a book). I don’t (in the case of games) do this very often. I’m very ADD when it comes to games; my interests are extremely broad and my time is fairly limited. I literally don’t have time to play even a fraction of the games I’m interested in. But in a single player game, the possibility, at least, exists. You can certainly be ‘done with’ an MMO but you’re never going to see those closing credits, right?

The second thing I’m looking for is Narrative, or story. As has been pointed out by many people, a mediocre single player storyline is generally better than the best MMO stories, just because the world can morph and change to support the story and that one character who the story revolves around. MMOs have lore, but not a lot of story. This, at least, is true until you get to higher levels; I’ve heard about some pretty interesting storylines that happen in dungeons in some MMOs.

But I never get to dungeons since I play solo, so all the content in the dungeons of MMOs, which is often the best content (from what I read, anyway), may as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s another issue. I’m a single-player gamer. I always have been. Again, going back to the days before video games, I used paper & cardboard chit wargames as a place to escape to in the way a lot of unhappy kids escape into books (I did some of that, too). I always preferred tactical games because I’d have stories in my head about the various units. Essentially I translated the make-believe games little kids perform with plastic army men into more elaborate make-believes stories about soldiers involved in house-to-house fighting in WWII, or the captains of tall ships sailing under Nelson’s flag. I was role-playing before there were role-playing games, I guess.

Here at the other end of my life, I’m reverting to the same kind of thing, in a more adult manner. After a long day of work and chores and work, I’m really enjoying slipping into someone else’s skin via playing a single player game. I *can* do that, to a certain extent, in an MMO, but it isn’t as peaceful. I always have people jarring me out of my reverie via just being people, y’know? (This is also one of the great strengths of MMOs; it’s all about context and what you need.) For the same reason, I have zero interest in playing non-MMO multiplayer games, even though when I hear twitter friends talking about their gaming sessions I feel a bit envious because it does sound like they’re having fun.

I generally get around to gaming time about 10 pm, though, and by then I’m feeling pressed for time so don’t want to have to fiddle about, and I’m sick and tired of dealing with people, even people who I love, so really need that alone time to recharge.

I’m also, honestly, tired of the MMO community as a community. There are a lot of MMO players out there who I am very legitimately fond of, but the ‘chorus’ of the community is starting to grate on me a bit. We just seem to recycle the same old arguments and debates and, when playing, I can’t help but be drawn in, almost against my will. Now that I’m not playing MMOs, a lot of the discussions (Is SW:TOR just WoW reskinned!!?!) just wash over me. I hear them, but I don’t really care about them enough to get into it.

Like Scopique, I’m just kind of tired of the bitching. Single player gamers bitch too, but I don’t know many of them so I don’t hear it very often.

Of course, the downside to all of this is that I no longer have a lot to say to my friends, which makes me worry that I’ll lose them as friends.

I also know that my gaming habits are like a huge pendulum, and eventually what I want from a game is going to be a vibrant, living world to explore, and those can only be found in MMOs, so eventually I know I’ll go back and I’ll be posting here about how lifeless and dull single player games are!

Honestly I’m not a fan of Gamefly. It feels too expensive and in the past the service has been really slow for me. But I had a ‘secret code’ to get two months for the price of one (click the joystick at the top right corner and enter code “Confirmed” to get the deal – that code comes from the Weekend Confirmed podcast) so I figured I’d give it another shot, given the thoughts fluttering around in my head.

After watching E3 I got a hankering to go back and play some games that have sequels coming out this year. I loved Resistance: Fall of Man back when the PS3 launched, but I never played Resistance 2 (and never heard much good about it) but with Resistance 3 coming soon, I had the urge to get a copy of R2, put it on Easy Difficulty and blow through it in order to catch up with the story.

Ditto Gears of War 3. I played about half of Gears 1 but Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski was lamenting the fact that no one ever talks about the Gears storyline, which he thinks is quite good. I was willing to give it another go, but no longer own Gears 1 and never tried Gears 2.

And etc, etc. But the point was, I was in the mood to get copies of these games and blast through them on easy mode and as quickly as possible. That sounded like a good match for Gamefly.

We’ll see. I signed up yesterday and today they’re sending out my first game, Crysis 2 (PS3) which was somewhere around #5 on my queue. I do want to play Crysis 2 so I’m not complaining but it was odd that a relatively new game that far down my queue is what’s getting sent, when old and unloved Resistance 2 is sitting in position 1. I guess it’s a matter of inventory, though.

I’m expecting to be disappointed with the service, but we’ll see. If the game arrives before the weekend I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and honestly I’m already feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse from having signed up.