Plus Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams teaser trailer and WAR issues...
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Sarah get your gun!
Some people have way to much time on their hands. I know, because I am one of them. Yet when it is in the greater service of shenanigans, who am I to disoblige them?
The always entertaining folks at Politico have crafted a flash animated game of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin shooting Russian ICBM’s, MIG’s, flying pigs – with lipstick garnish – and of course, moose.
My high score thus far has been north of 240, but after you reach a certain point the game just hoses you with targets. The moose is the toughest target to plink at when the aerial targets begin to swoop on you. Then again, I fear the grim specter of Bullwinkle will have is revenge on me if I’m too good a shot, so I’ll just leave him be.
No, this will not give you foreign policy experience
PS3 Bioshock port reveals Bioshock 2 teaser trailer
Bioshock fans rejoice! There is light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is a Big Daddy.
Those PS3 owners wise enough to purchase the genius title will get a rather pleasant surprise at the end of their game: the teaser trailer for Bioshock 2.
For the uninitiated, Bioshock was named Game of the Year in several publications and gaming websites. If you don’t own it you have no excuse, for it is available on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Go buy it. Now.
Tentatively called Bioshock: Sea of Dreams, the teaser doesn’t reveal much, other than a nice FMV sequence showing a young lady standing around with a Big Daddy doll. Making an educated guess I would say that she is a Little Sister all grown up, and she’s using some sort of telekenesis to make the Rapture sandcastle. Observe:
Waithammer: Age of Queuing
It’s not a secret of my distinct love and affection for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. The game is simply genius and has proven itself to a WoW-weary constituency. With more than 750,000 subscribers, WAR is off and running.
Yet not without its issues. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of the game and my reviews on this blog have been very positive. Too positive? Maybe. I got chatted up by a friend who said that “You are incapable of being critical of the game, it’s like a new girlfriend. Everything is perfect in the courtship period. And then, eventually, she leaves you and steals your cat.”
While I have to give him points for deftly inserting a “So I Married an Axe Murderer” reference, he is wrong. I am quite capable of being a pretentious, over-critical git anytime, anywhere. So with that, I would like to point out some of the flaws in WAR that have been driving me mad.
In your face, Nathan!
Animations. The animations thus far have been varied, and since there are more than twenty classes in the game you see a wide array of animations for combat, spell-casting, et al. Still, some of them continue to be bugged. For example, ranged weapons and magic fire off their respective arrow, bullet or fireball. Yet if the target moves, the missile will track them, following them around. With a fireball I suppose that’s okay, but it’s just weird to see bullets following targets around like a rogue comet.
Pathing. Jumping and running are no problem – unless you are trying to run and jump over something. Like a rock. Or a fence. Or a stick. My toon will regularly get caught on something - while jumping over a bolder for instance – and then begin to jitter, making the screen jump and shudder as well. This also happens when running up a hill. This only seems to happen while trying to get around “impassible terrain” but it also happens on staircases. If you try to jump over the staircase you wind up “floating” above the railing and it forces you downward. That’s fine, but just a little annoying.
Mounts. I’ve come around on in-game mounts in regards to how they look – except for the rendering of my horses tail, it’s basically a black “+” that you can see if you look close enough – but lately I’ve been pretty frustrated. As a Chaos Chosen, I am basically a DPS/tank unit with plate armor and a very, very large axe and in turn my horse looks like an evil Clydesdale horse. So with all that armor and all that concentrated toughness, you’d think it would take more than a chicken to unhorse me but it doesn’t. I regularly get unseated by chickens, rats, and mobs that are grey – or very low level. At higher levels with units that are statistically challenging to me this would be OK. A Nurgle Plaugebearer knocking me off my horse is plausible. But when a level one rat somehow knocks me off a mount, then I have a problem.
Realm PVE. I get that WAR is an MMO based on PvP for the most part, borrowing heavily from its successful spiritual forebear Dark Age of Camelot, but the PVE could use just a little fine-tuning. The story behind WAR is one of massive invasion by Chaos forces into the realms of Order. There is much pillaging, et cetera. After a while it begins to feel just a bit rote. Playing a Chaos Chosen I’m basically chasing Empire soldiers around, which is fine. It just seems like the same scenarios, the same mobs in every single zone. The environments are great and feature a lot of diversity from realm to realm, I just wish the mobs had the same. Some might argue you can travel to the Orc or Dark Elf zones to mix it up, and that’s true and I have, but it still feels the same.
Waiting. For the love of all that’s holy, the wait times and the ques are horrendous. I had to wait eight minutes to log on to my main server. The fine people at Mythic are adding new servers almost daily and cloning toons from the busiest servers to the new ones. They are even adding double the XP for a few days just for the trouble. Unfortunately that’s my main server – all my friends, all my gear, everything is on that server. I am loathe to give it up.
Gold Spammers. Yes, the best for last. This is the most infuriating part of my game. These degenerate village idiots blast me with “HAI U CAN BUY CHEEP WAR GOLD AT WWW.WERUINURELIFE.COM SO COME BUY THEM NOW PLZ.” If anyone at Mythic is reading this, please let this be what you come away with: you really need to allow right-click reporting and ignoring of these gibbering morons. I have already filled up my “ignore” list on gold spammers alone. Please, please, please help. These people are ruining the game.
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