Vintage

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Ok, I find it hilarious that they mixed up a review for the product description. In case it should get fixed here it is pasted in all its glory:

Shattered Suns (PC-DVD)
Shattered Suns (PC-DVD)
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
$39.82
Shattered Suns wastes its promise with terrible presentation values and poor implementation of its 3D combat system.
$39.82
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Merry Christmas all, its been an… interesting year. In an effort to turn negatives into positives, I’ve been able to experience a variety of jobs through the temporary services, I’m on my second semester in school working on my associates degree in business administration and as always, have a wonderful family.

My son has earned about eight more badges this quarter in Boy Scouts, and has maintained good grades, and a good attitude overall despite otherwise being a typical monosyllabic fourteen year old.

On the game front, both I and my wife have thrown off the MMO shackles once and for all, in my case the battle of the acronyms of OCD vs. ADHD vs. WoW is over, with ADHD having a narrow margin of … ooooo shiny….

The WoG GURPS game is still going strong, the young knights are becoming point-bloated monstrosities, but its all fun.

PC Gaming had a couple of bright spots for me this year:

Dragon Age: Origins is as excellent as I hoped it would be, the story is serviceable with few real surprises but never quite feeling cliche, the voice acting is excellent, and the character interaction beats my all time favorite in the category - Jagged Alliance 2. If I have any complaints, its that any length would be too short. They’ve put out some DLC and there is another one due out ‘this holiday season’, but it will add maybe an hour or two tops. Out of necessity, the game is very story driven, which means replay is more about discovering new interactions and little nuances of the different race/class combinations, rather than take the story off this way. The ending can be drasticly different, but my ADHD addled ass hasn’t been able to do another complete playthrough while my wife is on her third.

League of Legends: Demigod is fun, but I can’t ever get an online game working. LoL (heh) is easy to find a game, the free version works out fine, with you able to ‘buy’ most characters/enhancements with points earned in play, or the rich bastards can, just like in real life, buy everything with real money. Visually its roots in Defense of the Ancients is obvious, and its a good thing. While I’m not sold on balancing, the character design and feel is excellent, with a hell of a large variety.

Torchlight: A rock-solid addictive action RPG. Titan Quest may have finally been beaten in my collection, while TQ has far more options with their character classes, TL has (semi-)random dungeons, making later playthroughs less of a chore. What do I mean semi-random? Well, the main dungeon ‘theme’ is the same five or so levels at a time, starting with mines, to tombs and so on, and the levels are sometimes repetitive. The visual style is old school Warcraft, cartoony, but in a good way, and the effects are great.

Onto the consoles:

We’ve been milking out a Gamefly subscription this year, in lieu of our MMO subscriptions, and as of this Christmas we’ve got all three consoles in the house.

PS3 Highlights

Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice: A Keeper. A zany story, funny characters and massive amounts of tactical goodness bumped Final Fantasy Tactics out of my top spot.

Borderlands: Pure gun porn. FPS/Action RPG with randomized loot tables that put diablo to shame, its been lots of fun, my son and I have played split screen and separately, and he’s dabbled online. DLC is starting to come out with The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned back in November, and Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot due for the PS3 in early January. I hope it has legs, the random loot and four characters is promising, but the maps and quests never change, so we’ll see.

Uncharted 2: My son opted for this one on his gift card, and I was sucked in immediately when I realized Steve Valentine and Claudia Black voiced the two rogues that recruited the main character, both of them were stellar in Dragon Age: Origins. It’s very cinematic in all the right ways, and so far a lot of fun.

Modern Warfare 2: While it EITHER needs to be Call of Duty

5

OR just Modern Warfare 2 its apparently CoD 4 MW 2. That’s as stupid as the X-Men 1.5 DVD my wife bought… that aside, it looks good, the campaign is fun, and we get our asses kicked online.

Infamous: Solid game, lots of fun open world-ish wandering around, but again with the laughable morality choices? (its been done to death elsewhere, google it)

In the We Rented and Mean to Get eventually category:

Batman: Arkham Asylum: A great ‘hybrid’ look to the characters, with a real love of the lore, and voiced by the Batman: The Animated Series alumni - what the hell is not to like?

Finally got to put the newest edition of Hackmaster to the test, WE LOVED IT.

The three boys (aged 12, 13 and 14) as well as the esteemed Mark Caliber played while I GMed.

It’s hilarious to see the old cycles repeat. Two of the boys rolled thieves, and sure enough, were trying to figure out ways to steal from party members.

Our brave Fighter (with Intelligence 6 and Wisdom 7) died in a nasty fight with an orc pack. The expected arguments over looting his body broke out.

They tried to screw each other out of loot, NO ONE wanted to play the cleric. (Funny enough, the replacement character is a cleric)

Its definitely old-school, in all the right ways.

Attacker rolls an attack die, defender gets a defense die. Armor doesn’t stop you from getting hit, but helps you from getting hurt. We GURPS-heads loved that. I like that weapon speed is actually playable easily, and that there’s no distinction in artificial ‘turns’ ’rounds’ or anything else.

Magic is improved greatly over first edition AD&D with the mage having spell points available to beef up his casting (at a cost) or even cast spells he may not have memorized (at greater cost).

We’ll get to see a cleric next session.

Handy, handy alignment links for the young n00bs: Goblin Hollow and a great one fro

…especially now that I don’t need it! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass GFWL.

GFWL is henceforth known locally as Get F***ed With Licensing? - honestly people, copy protection that doesn’t protect your product but just punishes the honest purchaser is mind boggling. It’s like buying a car alarm that ONLY GETS SET OFF IF YOU USE THE KEYS.

This is old (in internet terms), but Shamus sums it up nicely.

I ranted a bit about it here and after the latest Fallout 3 DLC came out, I had my latest outbreak of self-loathing and Tourettes Syndrom that I hope other PC gamers go through, and again considered giving up on PC gaming all together…

(Although I don’t have the money for the Xbox/PS3 AND the required lobotomy, so I have to soldier on)

After many head-banging moments it turns out that while it’s impossible to *prove* the 1.5 patch is causing crashes for tons of players, *coincidently* the folks that work around the 1.5 patch aren’t having those crashes.

Yeah. Coincidence.

I know patches are a bitch, you fix one problem and cause another. But I’m not your beta-tester Bethesda, I bought the game.

Back on topic: After some digging I’ve fixed my problems, and am happily playing again. I’ll post my ‘must have’ addons and the fix in a separate post.

See it. Obsessive fanboy whiners go soak your heads; being a TOS and later Star Fleet Universe fan (Star Fleet Battles) its nice to see alot of the damage undone to the story line.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

While I’m still thinking of it;

So the party managed to beat the Sea Giant, Scare off the Sea Witch, and capture Nos’ brother, Vetok.

Next session: Rashida will be in command of 10 of the knights, and 100 dwarven mercenaries.

The Knights
Rashida
Bedemere
Nos
Jaerik
Tash
Jor
Fang
Fist
Gwynn
Beth

Ok, so there’s a new expansion for Fallout 3, and being a tool, I got it. Despite all the grousing out on the interweb, my FO3 experience has been pretty bug free.

The expansions haven’t been buggy - the damn Live client has. I constantly have connection issues TO PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME, AND THE EXPANSIONS I BOUGHT AND DOWNLOADED…

Just so I can compare my achievements with some retard that can’t operate a PC so he got an XBox instead. Yay. When the hell are the game companies going to realize that making it a pain in the ass to PLAY your games means we are going to stop buying them and move on to companies that don’t rely on such crap?

Honestly, I HAD to have Steam to install and play Empire:Total War - if my internet connection goes down, I can’t play a single player wargame? WTF?

I’ve moved the write-ups ‘MC’ and I both did for the Campaign to the front page. Interesting contrast.

Pop back here to look.

I’ve played through and beaten the ‘Grand Campaign’ as the Prussians, and started a new game as the Matarahahahaha Confederacy (Whatever, the Hindu Indian faction).

Overall I like the game. The battles are excellent, even if the AI is exploitable, its still fun.

The diplomacy/research/economic bit is a mixed bag, and is definately secondary to the battle engine.

Assassins, Missionaries and Scholars are a neat extra.

Overall I’m pleased, but I’ve got the nagging suspicion that I’d be just as happy if not happier playing Europa Universalis II to scratch that campaign ‘itch’ and just load up E:TW for the occasional ‘quick’ battle.

The scores coming in at 7.8, 80% etc. etc. Seem about right.

The poor D&D halfling… talk about an identity crisis.

Lets see, they’ve gone from pure tolkien rip-off (D&D, AD&D)

… to a wierd chameleon species AD&D
Tallfellows (vaguely elf-looking that lived near elves)
Stouts (vaguely dwarf-looking that lived near dwarves)

… to being made setting specific and being made into Kender (AD&D Dragonlance setting)
… to being cannibals (AD&D Dark Sun Setting)

Back to being Kender in D&D3e (and I presume 4e).

Boggles the mind. They’ve gone from a pastoral homey (not homie damnit) folk where an adventurer would be an odd duck (role playing potential assh**es, think about it) to a gypsy folk where every one of them is eager to see whats over the next hill etc. (i.e. every halfling is an adventurer by temperment. Great.) and if the art is to be believed, are indistinguishable from elves except for size.

Jeez.

Also, when did gnomes loose the beards and all get nose jobs?