Deserving of Its Name

My copy of PC Gamer reached me over the weekend. Ordinary enough. But when I began to flick through the magazine, and article caught my eye that just about made me puke rainbows.

Firaxis have announced that they are working on a new X-Com game! It isn't an FPS! They've been working on it since 2007 so it gets released this year! This looks like it could finally be a worthy successor to the oldest game that I still play. The image to the right shows a very different looking game to the original that the fans are used to; the alien shown is the all-new "Man in Black", an almost human looking alien.

Firaxis say that, like before, there will be fully destructible environments and the premise seems very similar thus far: Send your team out in a Skyranger to fight aliens, recovering artefacts that can be researched or sold (or researched and then sold). So far, I like the look of most of the changes, particularly the level of soldier customisation that the game seems to allow. In the first game, all you could do was rename your troopers, but even that was enough for me. Giving soldiers a unique name created a sense of attachment, and giving them unique appearance is sure to make it that little bit more heartbreaking when Sergeant Garry Shultz finally gets it in the neck from a plasma blast on his eleventh mission after 15 confirmed alien kills. Another interesting addition is that of an actual cover system. I say actual because the original X-Com sort of had one in that you crouched your bloke behind a wall and hoped that the inevitable alien shooting phase would melt the brickwork and not his face. The new level up system is something I'm waiting to play with before I criticise. I liked the old way of how stat gains worked. Most stats would increase naturally as a character performed tasks. For example, marksmanship would improve through hitting an enemy target, bravery would improve through not panicking when the situation arose and reflexes would improve whenever a reaction shot (shooting during the enemy turn when a target comes into line of sight) was successfully made.

The only change that I don't like is that Firaxis have planned to allow only 4 soldiers per mission (later upgradable to 6). I would always roll with 9, 2 squads of 4 to sweep the map more quickly and 1 person looking after the transport and maybe using a mind probe to identify targets to capture for interrogation. I'm hoping that the game is mod friendly and that someone releases a mod to increase this limit to at least 8, while simultaneously increasing the proportion of aliens in the mission to account for this.

Reading some of the comments on sites such as "Kotaku" (Where the screenshot is from, by the way, though it also features elsewhere on the web and in magazines), some of the comments look fairly vitriolic and presumptuous about the game. Based on Firaxis' last strategy game released on consoles, some of this bile is fair enough, but what is important to remember is that Firaxis is the closest thing to the original developer that the X-Com franchise (as abused as it's name has been -  look at 2K's X-Com! How the hell is that X-com?) is going to get. I for one, cannot wait!

In other news, I took a pre-constructed Deck to a small-scale sanctioned Magic: The Gathering tournament held at my local gaming haunt (http://www.darksphere.co.uk/). I did quite well. Despite getting an automatic loss for turning up late, I went on to win two out of the four rounds I played in, but then dropped despite having a chance to reach the top 8 due to time constraints (I wasn't expecting to do well at all!).
My decklist, without sideboard,  is here: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/cry-some-more/

Back on Track...?

I'm not going to let this blog die!
Lately I've been focussing a lot more on Magic: The Gathering instead of video games.
Having said that, I did log on to World of Warcraft to raid with my guild for the first time in a while. Since last time, a new raid patch has come out.

I have to say, the new raid is much easier at this stage of release than Firelands, the last raid was before nerfing. We managed to clear the first 5 bosses without much of an incident (we occasionally suffered for the fact that it was my first time doing it and our lack of ranged damage, but that was about it) and we were forced to stop because we needed 2 more ranged damagers for the 6th boss. As a general rule, I'm trying to raid at least once a week.

As Magic goes though, Damn! I'm really looking forward to the prerelease of the new expansion. I'm going to a midnight launch in Central London for it with my Girlfriend. It is going to be amazing. Here is the trailer, made in the general MTG style, taking card art and animating it.

Browserfield 3

Got BF3 for Christmas. Yes, it is a great game, and there is nothing like watching two buffoons in fighter jets collide in mid-air that makes you feel like part of a sprawling, epic battle. The game produces a lot of epic battle moments and the squad system really seems to get people working together. Overall, great game, though I don't know why they focussed so much on the graphics of a title released for a 64 player multiplayer (the single player might as well not exist). The frames per second i get, even on low graphical settings, are terrible sometimes.

Oh, and it has a browser page for a main menu. That is a bit annoying too.

Skyrim... SKYRIM!

Got Skyrim last saturday. Since then I have clocked about 35 hours on the damn thing and haven't touched any other games. I'm sure my WoW guild won't mind since they have been on a recuritment drive lately and now the guild is brimming with trial members to test out.

I have to say, the game is amazing! I haven't had this much fun with an RPG since, well, Oblivion. I can't say that my school work has suffered. This week, I've been getting comparatively little work, which has given me even more time to play this beast.

The addition of dragons initially makes wandering the game world quite tense; as a level six pretty much dressed in rags, I was pure dragon fodder. But now as a level 33 dressed in armour made from bits of dead dragon, they had started to become much less of a challenge. The biggest improvement in the game for me is the skill system. While one could argue that the simplified number of skills (now culled to 18, paling in comparison to the gloriously ludicrous number in morrowind - Four different skills for armour), the fact is that you specialise within each skill through the perk tree system. Most perk trees give you multiple routes to the final ability and pretty much all of them give you multiple directions to take. Unlike the other games also, there is no specialisation at the start whatsoever; you are completely free to mould your character to whatever playstyle you desire; you could even turn your axe swinging fighter into a mage if you wanted. but don't do that or you will probably screw yourself over in the late game, given that the game world levels up with you like it did in Oblivion (only it seems to work a bit better this time). The gameworld also feels much less lonely, even if your chosen companion doesn't say much. Oh, and there is the new adition of choices! Some quests now have multiple outcomes based on what you do. I'm definately going to be replaying the game to see different outcomes.

Anyway, the upshot is, Skyrim is great, and I'm going to be losing a lot ore of my life to it in all probability.

On a roll

Since my last post, Ragnaros has been downed by DNS at least twice. And my luck has indeed changed! (more on that later).

Yesterday, we attempted to put together a 25 man raid but ended up going five men short. Despite this handicap we downed Shannox and Ryolith (a testament to how hard the whole instance has been nerfed really). The other bosses were too troublesome for our plucky band so we ended the night with 2/7.

This night, I was not able to raid, As I was at my girlfriend's birthday dinner (yes, I fell in love! Never felt better!) so I was unable to join my friends, who cleared all the way up to Raggy (who looks set to go down again this week). Still, wouldn't have missed a chance to be with my love for the world.

My real life has been pretty hectic this week, even though I'm off school. Got loads of friends to meet up with, as well as studying to do. It's a miracle I have any time to raid/game at all. Overall, my life has been VERY busy.

Re-rolling

It's been far too long since the last update. Exams kind of got in the way. A lot has happened since my last post.

I'm back on good terms with my guild leader and raiding regularly. DNS has been raiding in firelands since not long after patch 4.2 was released and has now (with the help of the recent nerf) cleared six out of the seven bosses that firelands has to offer and has them effectively on farm. Only Ragnaros seems to be causing a problem, and we've cracked most of the fight (It's a looong encounter).

I signed up to raid yesterday, but because of the volume of people wanting to join, I was forced to roll off against another guildie. A rogue called Listeta. Listeta rolled a 24. "Easy enough to beat" I think, and promply roll a 17.

After a brief mocking of my abysmal dice luck, the raid departs and I'm left to do bog standard dungeons for the next couple of hours with a couple of others who had been denied a raid spot (and do some skinning in the mean time). Dungeons go fairly abysmally. The random dungeon finder throws up some terrible people (and some of the more grueling dungeons to boot) and after a 2 and a half hour slog, I've only cleared 2, having abandonned 3 seemingly lost causes (and the deadmines. Lord, I hate that place).

Then, Paindk, the officer leading the raid, declares in guild chat that he needs a DPSer. "sign me up, bro", I reply. He promptly does so. To my initial dismay, instead of firelands, I am transported to an older raid, Obsidian Sanctum. Having cleared the first six bosses with no hinderance, the raid had decided to go to OS for a mount run. The boss goes down in 46 seconds and drops the mount. Which I lose with an even more dreadfull roll of 9.

Maybe my luck will change...

Old Poison

I'm finally back after exam season. And back on the videogames again.
 only just recently moved into a new house and was able to set up my gaming rig. I decided to go back to some of the older games on my hard drive.

I went for CoD4 first. The playerbase, though diminished, is still going fairly strong. It's hardly suprising, given what a great game it is. Its sequels might have new features and more gimmicks (bayonets, throwing knives and crossbows), but none since have captured the same feeling and atmosphere as CoD4, forsaking it instead for even more over-the-top hollywood action vibes.

And then, I returned to an old favorite. World of Warcraft. my initial experience was poor; in my first dungeon, I was kicked from the group because the warlock decided to pull a group from behind while I was focussing on one already, causing us to wipe. I was then promptly ignored by my guild leader when I clumsily appologised for being away for so long. It looks like I'm going to have to start from scratch.