Pagoda of Gaming

I’ve got a whole bunch of news, opinions, and events to go through, so let’s hit it up like an SMG: Bullet point style pewpewpew!

Edinburgh

My holiday in Edinburgh felt to me like less of a holiday – more like living in the city for a week like an unemployed person. I didn’t do anything totally touristy: I did basically what I used to do at Uni. Wake up, eat, play games, buy crap, go to the movies, sleep. It was great fun. Though only a slight depressing reminder at the same time. In retrospect it was nice to get a way for a week.

It would’ve been better if the flat we were staying in had an internet connection, but the iPhone managed to keep me updated on the goings on and keep me constantly tweeted. For the gaming side of things, I spent a lot of time at The Ministry of Gaming, which is just an amazing place for any passing through gamer in Edinburgh. I spent two wholeish days at the place playing mostly WoW, but a bit of CoD4 and Left 4 Dead too.

Movies

I saw three movies down in Edinburgh. Zombieland was the overall best movie of the week. I felt it was more of a nerdy road trip movie than an outright Zombie movie, and in a scary way I totally identify with with the main character.

Dorian Gray was really… Dirty, like sexy dirty, like the kind of dirty your mother shouldn’t see. I felt throughout that it never totally touched on the curse that Dorian had enacted. Very good acting from Colin Firth and Ben Barnes, that really played up the overall darkness of the film throughout.

The bottom of the pile is The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – It was just really lame throughout, and it felt really stitched together, especially at the end – quite possibly due to Heath Leger’s departure in the middle of filming. I would recommend avoidance.

A Dash of MTG

When I was away I got it into my routine to buy at least two boosters of Zendikar a day. This amounted to many many booster packs. And I got a bunch of great rares from it. A Foil Luminarch Ascension, three rare fetchlands, a Day of goddamn Judgement. Now I’m really jonesing for a booster box, and more importantly a Fat Pack, because none could be found of either on my trip. One of the days I tripped to Fundee for the day and played some magic for the first time since… the Zendikar pre-release. I got to test out a bunch of decks, and discovered some things I ought to clear up with some Deck Chef Desserts.

The Foods

Oh the food. It was delicious. One of the things I miss most about my time in Edinburgh was how wonderfully full and satisfied my belly felt, near 24/7. The steaks, the sandwiches, the near-daily morning fry up. The highlight meal of the week was certainly my trip to Tang’s sushi restaurant. I took a lot of pictures when I was there, via twitter and the iPhone, and you can see a bunch of the deliciousness via my yfrog feed. Like this one:

The Dedicated Server Debacle

So there isn’t going to be any dedicated servers and the like for Modern Warfare 2. Infinity Ward have taken it upon themselves to blow the old, dated systems of PC gaming out of the water and everyone (and by everyone I mean the vocal minority) is up in arms about it.

Down in Edinburgh, at The Ministry of Gaming, I tried CoD4 for the first time on the PC – a little multiplayer action. I felt reviled. Each server was populated with maxed prestige players and half of the servers were running crazy map mods that prevented any number of Perks and Weapons (I even found one blocking Deep Impact for fuck sake). There and then I revoked my acceptance that I would be buying two versions of the game this holiday season. But since this new info has come out, I’ve since changed my mind.

To get to the damn point. I’m happy that Infinity Ward has gone out of their way to make these changes, and what it accounts to is that they’ve basically took the multiplayer system from Halo 3 and ripped it right off, like so so SO many developers should have done already. It’s freaking great, you pick what kind of game you want to play and go – no worries about scrolling through an infinite list of servers looking for pings and dodging mods and custom maps3, no worries about your favourite weapon being denied, and especially no worries about vengeful Admins going into no-clip mode and ghosting you down like Bruce Willis.

Infinity Ward controls the game now – and I trust them. They’ve already been kind enough to offer Steamworks integration, and maybe with a closed system like this, they’ll be more forthcoming to release map packs and mini-expansions, without the fear of piracy. And for all the whining mapmakers and machinemists out there, I’m sure they won’t leave you hanging for long. But what do I care? I’ll be playing on my X-Box anyway.

Metro2033

It’s not really the time of the year to be announcing games, especially with the following calendar pretty full already. But THQ saw it fit to release a teaser trailer for Metro 2033. The short of it: It looks like =Fallout 3 – RPG elements + Russia. Looks interesting, I’ll certainly keep it on the radar. Check out the trailer below…

Cryptic & Star Trek Online

So Star Trek Online is supposed to launch in Q1 next year. After all the shit that went down, and is still going down with champions online, particularly my negative experience, I’m officially worried. Champions online sucks balls, to be completely blunt. It’s buggy, it’s very very laggy (especially considering there are only servers in America), and I don’t think it had enough time to simmer before it was served. Could the same happen to STO? You know, I actually think they might. And that makes me sadface.

Warcraft & Icecrown Citadel

A gigantic grats to me for finally Dinging a character to 80 in WoW. It only took… a year? Rin the Shadow Priest is now ready for the Cataclysm, whenever that might be. I was convinced that I wouldn’t need to login until then, but now I learn that the Dungeon in which we will face the Lich King will be a 5-man run.

I’m hoping that I don’t need to be epically geared to do the deed of sticking it to the Lich King – but I realise that Blizzard would probably like it to be that way. So it’ll probably be out of my reach in some kind of way. I’d totally play again if it were the case that I could do a bunch of quests in succession to gain access, or a couple of runs of the first two dungeons in the Citadel to get to what this expansion’s been about all along.

I love the shit out of WoW, always will, but it needs to cater the casual demographic a little more when it comes to the Endgame – It feels like too much of an investment to keep on playing for such sparse rewards past the cap.

Rock Band 2

A year later, I finally pick this up, along with a Mic and the Portable Drum Kit – a cheap option to the real drums, though no equal I’m sure. I haven’t really sat down to go through the motions of the career mode. It’s been a while since I’ve done any music game type thing and my bouts on the guitar a couple of weeks ago with Electric Six, assures me that my Hard level technique isn’t quite there anymore. Eye of the Tiger type montages of pain and sweat is required of me to be my own metal champ once again…. I just can’t find the time.

Uncharted 2

Everyone’s got a good opinion of Uncharted 2. I believe that is is also good, but frustrates me to the point that I don’t endeavour to play it much. For some reason I just cant take dying and replaying the same 10 minute section, so I turn it off. It’s probably the combat. The Gears of War series is probably the pinnacle of the 3rd person cover shooter genre, but it doesn’t have to deal with the tomb raider elements Uncharted presents, and I feel the pains of the two colliding too frequently.  I haven’t touched the multiplayer yet, that’s usually the final part of the process for me. I do not believe that this is the Saviour of the PS3. And that Batman is probably the Third Person game of the year.

Brutal Legend

I’m finding Brutal Legend to be utterly mediocre, which was not my expectation. There’s so much I have to say about that game, that could probably amount to a review of sorts. But for now you should know that the Demo isn’t indicative of the final experience. Fighting dudes and driving is all well and good, but getting other dudes to fight the dudes you should be fighting whilst trying to maintain captured points on a map is one hell of an other story. Be wary future purchasers.

Borderlands

I’m a couple of hours into Borderlands and I’m having a good time with it. The one negative thing I could say about it is the story and the characterisation. The game leaves them at the door, and to get much more out of it you have to turn to the quest dialogue. I’m also hoping that there’s much more enemy variety round the corner, as the dog-lizard hellions are starting to bore me a little. Borderlands is a tough game to describe, to say that it is simply a FPS would be a disservice – so I point you HERE to GiantBomb’s video review.

South Park: Let’s Go Tower Defence Play!

I bought it the instant I got home from holiday and I was not dissapointed. It’s a delightfully hard game – unlike uncharted which I cannot bear, this game expects try after try, and I gladly give it. There is a ton of content in this game, from the depth of the gameplay to the library of video content and unlocks you’re given at a very steady pace. I urge 360 owners to try the demo, especially south park fans. It wins extra points for the Japanese accent announcer (who is totally Trey Parker) “REVER COMPREETO!”

Now onto Christmas

It’s officially Q4 now, and that means that I’ll be blogging a little less about deckbulding and the like. I’m more than amazed at myself that I managed to do 7 entries of Deck Cheffery in a row. But it really bogged down the blog. Not that I’m going to stop, they’ll just be done fortnightly from now on. On other weeks I might get round to writing those reviews I’ve been thinking about. I’ve got some rather controversial opinions on alot of the high tier games that have come out the past while, and it’s been a while since I’ve done an out and out rage post.

Also, don’t expect a post the weekend MW2 comes out. But I don’t expect anyone to be reading that weekend either.

Helmet Frigid Wormhole

My little trip to Edinburgh last week, though well intentioned, turned out to be a bit of a clusterfuck. The Games Festival was utterly dissapointing, and from the way things looked, the Friday would’ve delivered more precious treasures - but I had to leave on friday morning. There was only enough entertainment there, in the public area, to keep myself satisfied for about an hour.

Arkham Asylum was there showing the exact same demo as the one released on PSN and XBLM the week previous with only the small addition of 3 of the game’s many challenge rooms.Wii Sports Resort dominated the entire show floor with a gigantic booth that I avoided like the plague. From there came constant playing of annoying steel drums and for some reason microphone toting commentery that was even louder than the drums. The Sony Eyepet made an appearance, and then needed to be reset every 10 minutes due to crashing and didn’t appear to be playable by the public. Realtime Worlds, the company you would think would pull out all the stops at this kind of event had a laptop sitting on a table looping the same 5-minute trailer we all saw via E3, a bunch of recruitment leaflets, and the person manning the booth wandering about aimlessly 20-or-so feet away. Mini-Ninjas had a demo going, but I was instantly dissapointed as I began to play, expecting a somewhat mature cartooney Ninja Gaiden game from a company more known for. Instead what I played was Zelda mushed with Fisher Price with terrible controls.

I was also rather intrusively interviewed whilst playing Arkham for Playr. I’d like to think that my world class insight on the game would be good enough to make it to the show, I doubt I’ll actually see it.

The day did have it’s high points. I ate the best Japanese food I’ve ever eaten (granted, I don’t have much to compare it too) at Tang’s Sushi Restaurant. And I bought a painting done by some nameless dude on the Royal Mile who’s only tools were tore up peices of cardboard and a Dozen or so cans of spraypaint. I must’ve stood for about 30 minutes watching this dude spray layer after layer of paint onto the canvas to create something fantastically beautiful. I also saw G.I.Joe - And to review it in a sentence, I’d have to say that it was entertaining, but in the same way that the Fast and the Furious was.

The friday was such a rush to get out the door back to Fails’ (due to my mode of transportation) that the only thing I got to do was go to Black Lion games and check out their magic singles. Except they weren’t open at 10:30 despite being reassured by the clerk the evening before that they would be at 10. To make the day even better, my bank called me to inform me that my Debit card (my one and only) was the target of some fraud nearing £1000 in total, all placed at 4am in the morning. The offending transactions have been reverced, but since friday morning, the only cash I have had on me is barely enough to pay my Driving Lesson tomorrow.

Depressing Item #3: My iPhone has still yet to make an appearance. It’s extremely hard to describe where my order actually lies in the string of events and the many phone calls I’ve had to make to get anything done. I think that it will be delivered tomorrow and I think that it might be delivered to an adress that will have a recipiant to actually receive it. But the Case and the Protection Plan pack thingy was not sent, and in order to get them I have to order them again and THEN get a refund for the originally order - so I would be buying them twice. All because some motherfucker from DHL in Aberdeen decided to lose/steal my original order, the order that would’ve arrived on a day that I would’ve been able to receive it because I was actually at the receiving address and not at fucking work.

I haven’t really sat down and played anthing this past week either. I soldiered on and got my Planeswalker achievement (complete the game 100%) for Duels of the Planeswalkers, and I’m really jonesing for an expansion for that game. I played some Fallout 3 on the PC today - getting through some more of the main quest and making sure my dude stays charmically neutral. And I logged into WoW only to discover that I’m completely lost as to where each of my 3 Northrend bound characters actually are. So I logged out and figured I’d write something up for the Blog.

One of the better things that happened last week. Always brings a smile to my face.

Though in all that I think I figured out why I’m in this current gaming slump. I’m just not feeling addicted to anything right now - at this time of the year I’m usually knee-deep in Warcraft, but after my departure from the game a couple of months ago, I haven’t had the drive to return to it. My mind is after the constant stimulation a game like warcraft grants - that even when I’m not playing, the character I become is still persistant im my mind, and it takes the edge off the daily crap. I guess this explains why I was so determined to get a go of WAR and Champions Online, to try and rekindle the old flame. Maybe if I soldier up and get past the daunting task of relearning a level 78 character, I’ll get a new lease on the game up until Pwnmas time atleast. But also, the slow as fuck internet connection isn’t helping either - preventing both online play and seriously needed patching - I was up til 4am last night dealing with the latter. Maybe THESE new, pretty comprehensive, rumors for the next WoW expansion will draw me back in. To be honest, I’m really impressed. Moreso if they turn out to be true.

Luckily next week we’re getting Shadow Complex via XBLA, a game I’m very much looking forward too, and have the points in account to actually buy. Then after that I have to make sure I’ve got enough cash in my wallet to get Arkham Asylum next-next week. Then after that It’s the long wait until we receive whatever is left of the Q4′09 release schedule, after losing so much to next year.

I’ve also got a pretty big MTG related post to polish off and throw up, and hopefully I’ll get that done early next week. I’ve got like 2 more paragraphs to round off and then a billion cards to hyperlink, but if it works out - and if I get any requests - it may turn into being something semi-regular I can write to fill the Magic void that is present without opponent.

So that was was my holiday. Tomorrow I return to work and the ever recurring cycle it brings, with even more delicious pitfalls to make me feel that little bit more hate-filled. But the worst thing is that through all the fear and loathing, I’ll probably forget that this fortnight even happened.

maybe I wasn’t home