I’m not dead, yet.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately! I’ll be frank, I did not log in WAR for a few weeks, not really because I don’t like the game but gaming has been a bit sporadic for me these days, maybe it is the fact that thousands of games have been released in a few weeks.
I hope everything is good in WAR still, I’d like to try the recent changes soon but I guess before January this will not be possible!
My job contract has been turned into an undetermined duration so I’m quite happy !
I’ll be back with WAR news sometimes.

Happy Birthday Half Life!

That’s right guys, Half life was released the 19Th November 1998, 10 years ago!
That might not be significant for everyone but for me it is. I started my gaming career with Duke Nukem then I played a lot of Quake2 and then Quake3 so the FPS genre always was very important to me.

When Half-Life was released I remember playing it for hours, the story was so awesome. And then mods got released, Counter-Strike on which I played hours, but not only, Natural Selection and Day of Defeat also were really good mods that I spend way too many hours on.

Happy Bday Half Life!

Fear my photoshop skills!

Small update!

Maybe you are wondering what the hell I’ve been up to recently? No? Bah OK I’ll say anyway !
The short answer is a lot of Fallout3 and not a lot of free time, I’ve been busy at work and didn’t really want to play WAR. I’m still waiting anxiously for that patch 1.0.5 hoping it will improve the game. I’ve been thinking about rolling a Squig Herder recently, the career looks fun, goblin rocks and they are going to get boosted with the next patch. Also I figured that the part in the game where I have the more fun is in the first tiers.

On another note Left4Dead has just been released and I didn’t have a chance to test it yet. So that means I have some zombie bashing to do when I get the chance. I guess I’ll have to postpone my WAR activities for the next week because I’ve received an invitation for the “The Chronicles of Spellborn” beta test, I already finished the client download just need to patch and I can give it a try. Of course the game’s still under NDA so I will not be able to give you much information… The game should be released the 27Th November.

If all this planned gaming was not enough, a good mate of mine, which played WAR with me got suck back to good ol’ Azeroth… I know I said numerous times that I would never touch Wow again, but having a mate to play with is really better than soloing an MMO, so I’ve been wondering if I should get WOTLK, even tho my Girlfriend would not be too happy, she is an anti-Wow person! I already have a Horde Shaman, a Warrior and a Warlock that are level 70. The shaman is my preferred character so I could jump right in, thing is I’d just do the quests to level 80 not sure If I could be arsed to play after that seeing the grind it is… I’ll think more about this.

Busy Gaming

I’ve been taking a break from WAR since Friday. I like the game but there are so many others getting released that need to be tested! At the moment my list looks like that : Dead Space, Fallout 3, Left4Dead Demo and NHL09(This will probably get ditched from my list it is not that good). Of course this is not taking into account the game that will be released soon : Call of Duty 5, Mirror’s Edge and later Left4Dead and The Chronicles of Spellborn.

Fallout3 is really awesome, the developers did a wonderful job at making a world that is enormous. I mean you can walk in the wastes for a long time then find a school go inside, spend at least 30 minutes clearing it and exploring just to get out to find more. The possibilities are endless. On top of that the skill & perks system, while not being overly new, is really well done.

The story is deep, you have plenty of quests to do, I barely started the main quest because I was mostly doing the side ones and just basically running around. I really like the combat system, It feels like it is better than Oblivion by a mile. This is really a good game, kudos to Bethesda.

Left4Dead was the other game I’ve been playing mostly this last week-end. With mates and voice coms this is incredibly fun, adding to this slaughtering hordes of zombies while drinking a few beers, this game can’t go wrong. It is good but not perfect, there are still a few bugs that I hope will be fixed for releases but generally speaking the gameplay is really good.

Dead Space is on hold for the moment as well as NHL 09. Don’t really know why I ordered this one, sounded good on paper but in reality it is quite poor. It is blatantly a console port, some screens even tells you to use the “X” or “Y” button… I can’t stand that and it doesn’t support my native wide screen resolution.

If you like small web games, I discovered on some blog can’t remember which tho, “Kingdom of Loathing”, an awesome little RPG game which is funny as hell! I suggest you try it if you are stuck at work like me!

Futur game releases #1

I really like Warhammer and I’m having tons of fun but sometimes it is good to play something else for a while. So when you come back you get this feeling of how awesome the game you left was and you notice the little things that you did not pay attention to before. In the next month plenty of new good games are going to get released so it is just the right period to do just that!

Here is a list of games to look forward to, along the European release date, usually US dates are a few days earlier. I also added some previews from the various gaming site around.

• Dead Space – 24/10/2008 : Survival Horror in Space
  Reviews : 1, 2, 3
  My Opinion: I’ve always been a big fan of the survival horror genre in movies, I love being scared and apparently Dead Space does just that. The game has just been released in Europe today so I could not test it yet but I’ve read numerous reports saying that it is really scary. Recommended to play at late hours in the dark with sound pumped up for maximum effect!

• Red Alert 3 – 28/10/2008 : Real Time Strategy
  Previews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: What can I say about this? Well I remember playing the original game when I was a young guy, those Tesla towers, the nukes and of course the actors played cinematic how can you forget them! I was quite a fan and I hope they can restore some of that with the new one. They still have actors, well should I say babes ? playing in the cinematic and the ever going fight between the Allied, the Soviet and the Empire of the Rising Sun.

• Fallout 3 – 31/10/2008 : Futurist Role Playing Game
  Previews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: I must admit that I never got to really play the old Fallout games released in the 1990 but this new one looks promising. You start the game in a post apocalyptic Washington DC and you must find your way through the city. There is lot of freedom you can wander around and kill mutants! There are the usual quests and NPC that you can talk to. Also the targeting system seems interesting, you can either engage monsters the traditional FPS way going gun blazing or you can engage the VATS targeting mode which pauses the game and let you pick parts of the enemy body to aim for, you have a limited number of action points that are used in this mode though.

• NHL 09 – 31/10/2008 : Ice Hockey Simulation
  Rreviews : 1, 2
  My Opinion: The reviews are for the xbox360 version but the game should be the same on the PC. I’m a big ice hockey fan, I’ve played it a long time when I was younger as a goalie and I had a blast. The older NHL games always made you change player and manage the whole team and I usually found that a bit too much for my liking. EA did something really nice in this game, centering the game around one player that you are, creating him much like a RPG character you would play in a fantasy world but here you play an ice hockey player. The coach gives you advice how to play and keeping your position instead of skating after the puck is more rewarding. Also they added the possibility to play online with others to play multiple matches, you can even take the goalie position I can wait to try it out!

• Wrath of the Lich King – 13/11/2008 : Fantasy MMORPG
  Previews : 1
  My Opinion: I won’t lie before playing Warhammer I played Wow extensively, I was in a big military guild doing raids from 8pm to midnight every day but Saturday. That was somewhat fun, because we went to all the big dungeons at the time, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple mainly. On the other side, if you missed a raid the management would get mad at you and the general atmosphere in the guild was more centered around loot and boss killing than having fun together as a team. After a few months I got really bored and it became a burden to have to log on every evening, the fun was just not there anymore, so I stopped. To be honest I’m done with Wow so I did not really read about the expansion but the few that I’ve seen looks to me being more leveling and grind, nothing more.

I had planned to speak about more games namely CoD5, Mirror’s Edge or Left 4 Dead but this article is already too long to my liking so I’ll do that in a later post someday next week!

That’s it for this issue, some really good games are coming our way and I can’t wait to test them out. Of course War will always be my home base where I always come back for some RvR fun!