Hi!
I was planning to talk about pro gaming in this post, and as it happens I catched via the almighty Interwebz that there was going to be a few matches tonight. It was the TSL starcraft league, whatever that is, and some players I recognized competing like Huk and Jinro. Now, I don't play multiplayer SCII I prefer to watch it instead for various reasons. As long as the casters are good you still understand what is going on enough to enjoy the games. About a year before SCII was released, I watched Brood War from Korea religiously, even the replays. Part of the fascination was not only that koreans get so excited about this game, but the fact that Starcraft was a really old game by then with ancient (ugly) graphics, and despite this still going strong.
I think Blizzard took the easy way out when they used the old resource-gathering system for SCII instead of a more modern one - but they had their reasons - and from what I gather even the koreans have adopted to play primarily SCII instead of the first one. This could be wrong, but at least the GSL uses SCII and that's the only thing I watch these days when it comes to SCII pro gaming. In the first Warcraft game, your workers chopped down trees and went into a mine for gold, which made perfect sense but various workers collecting glowing minerals and some sort of gas makes less sense. Oh well, the point is rather moot anyway since the game is already finished and released and has been so for over six months.
For some reason I think that games of SCII are less diverse than BW, again I'm no expert, but it seems that there certainly is more of a chance of a long macro game on BW which in my opinion are the most interesting ones to watch. So after a while I got tired of watching random dudes playing eachother each and every day on GSL. However, things change around when someone like Jinro is playing (or even Idra for that matter). I'm from Sweden so being able to root for a countryman makes watching the games all that more entertaining, much like any other random sport which I guess makes sense when you think about it. Just any foreigner (as in non-korean) is fun to root for as well, since it's inspiring that they make it all the way to Korea in order to duke it out with the godly koreans with their insane APM. If this sounds racist that's not the case, for example the name player koreans are often very cool to watch as well even though that was more of the case with the BW leagues. Besides from Starcraft, Counter-Strike and Quake Live are great games to watch pro gaming matches of, although they're not as popular and I'm not as involved and knowledgeable about exactly when and where you find these games streamed.
Until next time, signing off.
söndag 20 mars 2011
torsdag 17 mars 2011
Buddha Provides
Yo!
Not a lot of updates lately, as I mentioned in the previous post, much because I haven't played a lot of video games lately. Which in turn is because there aren't that many interesting that have been released. However, at times like these one can resort to friendly people like Buddha for example. Buddha provided me with the ability to replay Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country for SNES. Don't ask me how he knew that I wanted to play exactly those games, I suppose if you have reached complete insight and become one with the soul of the cosmos these things kind of come natural?
SMW I borrowed from some kid who lived on our street when I was younger and played it on my SNES (I never actually owned it). I remember finishing it very quickly and I enjoyed it but it never made that much of an impression on me. Playing it again today it really dawns on you how finely tuned a game like New Super Mario Bros for the Wii is. It might seem that NSMB for Wii has very few differences gameplay-wise when compared to the original Super Mario Bros for NES, but they really have come up with the perfect mix. I say this because SMW has not aged that well, it's not a bad game by any means, but today when a lot of features it introduced aren't that impressive it feels a bit lackluster of an experience. The enemies feel a bit off (baseball-throwing football players seem strange both flavor-wise and the way they play out - no wonder they have not returned in another Mario game), and the levels are bland. If I were to recommend a mario game for SNES it would be Super Mario All Stars - especially The Lost Levels (the real SMB2), or Yoshi's Island. The latter has awesome graphics and the only real downside is that you always run as Yoshi which can be troublesome in some parts.
I recently played through Donkey Kong Country Returns again and got all the Kong letters and pussle pieces. Playing Donkey Kong Country again it becomes more clear why I think the latest Wii outing doesn't really match up to its predecessor. DKC just has a more smooth and fast-paced gameplay, where you in DKCR often have to stop and shake the controller which turns it more into a dithery experience. Speaking of the popularily termed "waggle"-function of Wii games, it really is a blight on many games. The only rational explanation for it is that Nintendo forces the developers to put some sort of motion-controlled action into all games, even 2D platformers like NSMB and DKCR where it's completely unneccessary. Waggle would be fine it wasn't for the fact that it can fail, unlike the press of a button. If you press a button the game always responds, but when you waggle there is always a risk that you don't do it enough for the game to register it. This is particularily bad in games like NSMB where you need to waggle to fly with the helicopter hat. Many times in this game when you intend to activate the rotor, it doesn't register and Mario falls down to his untimely death. This is another downgrade to DKCR compared to the original game where you just had to press a button to perform a roll, as opposed to waggling it up in DKCR. I'm not opposed entirely to the motion sensor function of Wii, but there is a right and a wrong way of using it, waggling I think is a horrible idea - at the very least you as a player should be able change the button configuration for each game to get rid of it.
I'm gonna stop here for now but do have another topic ready for another blog post even if I don't play any video games so see you soon!
Peace out!
Not a lot of updates lately, as I mentioned in the previous post, much because I haven't played a lot of video games lately. Which in turn is because there aren't that many interesting that have been released. However, at times like these one can resort to friendly people like Buddha for example. Buddha provided me with the ability to replay Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country for SNES. Don't ask me how he knew that I wanted to play exactly those games, I suppose if you have reached complete insight and become one with the soul of the cosmos these things kind of come natural?
SMW I borrowed from some kid who lived on our street when I was younger and played it on my SNES (I never actually owned it). I remember finishing it very quickly and I enjoyed it but it never made that much of an impression on me. Playing it again today it really dawns on you how finely tuned a game like New Super Mario Bros for the Wii is. It might seem that NSMB for Wii has very few differences gameplay-wise when compared to the original Super Mario Bros for NES, but they really have come up with the perfect mix. I say this because SMW has not aged that well, it's not a bad game by any means, but today when a lot of features it introduced aren't that impressive it feels a bit lackluster of an experience. The enemies feel a bit off (baseball-throwing football players seem strange both flavor-wise and the way they play out - no wonder they have not returned in another Mario game), and the levels are bland. If I were to recommend a mario game for SNES it would be Super Mario All Stars - especially The Lost Levels (the real SMB2), or Yoshi's Island. The latter has awesome graphics and the only real downside is that you always run as Yoshi which can be troublesome in some parts.
I recently played through Donkey Kong Country Returns again and got all the Kong letters and pussle pieces. Playing Donkey Kong Country again it becomes more clear why I think the latest Wii outing doesn't really match up to its predecessor. DKC just has a more smooth and fast-paced gameplay, where you in DKCR often have to stop and shake the controller which turns it more into a dithery experience. Speaking of the popularily termed "waggle"-function of Wii games, it really is a blight on many games. The only rational explanation for it is that Nintendo forces the developers to put some sort of motion-controlled action into all games, even 2D platformers like NSMB and DKCR where it's completely unneccessary. Waggle would be fine it wasn't for the fact that it can fail, unlike the press of a button. If you press a button the game always responds, but when you waggle there is always a risk that you don't do it enough for the game to register it. This is particularily bad in games like NSMB where you need to waggle to fly with the helicopter hat. Many times in this game when you intend to activate the rotor, it doesn't register and Mario falls down to his untimely death. This is another downgrade to DKCR compared to the original game where you just had to press a button to perform a roll, as opposed to waggling it up in DKCR. I'm not opposed entirely to the motion sensor function of Wii, but there is a right and a wrong way of using it, waggling I think is a horrible idea - at the very least you as a player should be able change the button configuration for each game to get rid of it.
I'm gonna stop here for now but do have another topic ready for another blog post even if I don't play any video games so see you soon!
Peace out!
tisdag 8 mars 2011
Future releases
Hello!
I'm not really playing a lot of new games these days, I'm unemployed at the moment so my budget is a bit restricted, also there aren't that many games released that I'm that excited about. So I thought maybe I'd write a bit about some upcoming games that look promising and that I'm certainly looking forward to. So without further ado here goes a list in no particular order with the game, the platform I plan on getting it on and preliminary release date:
Silent Hill Downpour - 360 - Q3 2011
Battlefield 3 - PC - Q4 2011
Duke Nukem Forever - PC - 3 May
Resident Evil Revelations - 3DS - TBA 2012
L.A. Noire - 360 - 17 May
Mega Man Universe - 360 - TBA
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Wii - TBA 2011
I guess out of those it's just DNF and LA Noire that have an actual release date and one that is about two months away. So that's a lot of waiting left to be done, in the case of DNF two months feels like nothing though considering I've been waiting for that one for over a decade. Duke Nukem 3D has not aged very well, but at the time it was one of the most innovative Build-engine FPS games available alongside Dark Forces. It was funny that I learned about some of the quotes Duke uses from DN3D before actually hearing were they come from. Most of them are from Army of Darkness, classics such as "Groovy!" and "Hail to the king, baby!" to name a few.
I usually play quite a few old games, it's nice to relive classics and to play games I've missed for whatever reasons. Haven't been doing that a lot lately though. To be honest I don't quite know which direction I want to be taking this blog right now, the idea was to talk about current games I'm playing. But since I'm not really playing any games right now maybe the updates will have to wait, or I'll have to come up with some related topics to talk about. Another alternative would be to talk about Magic: The Gathering, but I feel that there are already a multitude of blogs about MtG out there so it wouldn't add much (of course there certainly are a lot of blogs about video games as well). I'm thinking that starting a separate blog for that topic would perhaps be a better idea. Oh well, the future will tell, time to sign off for now.
Laters!
I'm not really playing a lot of new games these days, I'm unemployed at the moment so my budget is a bit restricted, also there aren't that many games released that I'm that excited about. So I thought maybe I'd write a bit about some upcoming games that look promising and that I'm certainly looking forward to. So without further ado here goes a list in no particular order with the game, the platform I plan on getting it on and preliminary release date:
Silent Hill Downpour - 360 - Q3 2011
Battlefield 3 - PC - Q4 2011
Duke Nukem Forever - PC - 3 May
Resident Evil Revelations - 3DS - TBA 2012
L.A. Noire - 360 - 17 May
Mega Man Universe - 360 - TBA
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Wii - TBA 2011
I guess out of those it's just DNF and LA Noire that have an actual release date and one that is about two months away. So that's a lot of waiting left to be done, in the case of DNF two months feels like nothing though considering I've been waiting for that one for over a decade. Duke Nukem 3D has not aged very well, but at the time it was one of the most innovative Build-engine FPS games available alongside Dark Forces. It was funny that I learned about some of the quotes Duke uses from DN3D before actually hearing were they come from. Most of them are from Army of Darkness, classics such as "Groovy!" and "Hail to the king, baby!" to name a few.
I usually play quite a few old games, it's nice to relive classics and to play games I've missed for whatever reasons. Haven't been doing that a lot lately though. To be honest I don't quite know which direction I want to be taking this blog right now, the idea was to talk about current games I'm playing. But since I'm not really playing any games right now maybe the updates will have to wait, or I'll have to come up with some related topics to talk about. Another alternative would be to talk about Magic: The Gathering, but I feel that there are already a multitude of blogs about MtG out there so it wouldn't add much (of course there certainly are a lot of blogs about video games as well). I'm thinking that starting a separate blog for that topic would perhaps be a better idea. Oh well, the future will tell, time to sign off for now.
Laters!
måndag 7 mars 2011
Consolitis
Greetings!
The first time I played video games for real was when I played Ice Climbers on NES. For a long time consoles really helped to shape what we have come to know as video games and its genres. So it feels really strange and ironic that today I believe consoles are responsible for dumbing down video games as a whole and sort of restricting what comes out and is available to play.
In the late 90's a really hyped FPS that was coming out for the PC was one named Halo, developed by Bungie, a company at that point mostly known for the FPS Marathon for Mac. One of the selling points of Halo was that you would be able to drive around in vehicles in the game, which sounds silly today but at that time it was the coolest feature imaginable. The incredibly tedious buggy part of Half-Life 2 is there because of this. As the release date for Halo was getting closer however, some things were stirring in the pot that was going to cause a ripple effect resulting in what is today known as consolitis. The Face of Evil, Cthulhu Arisen, also known as Bill Gates and his company Microsoft was not far from releasing their first console X-box. What the console lacked was a good game to sort of flagship its release, and Halo fit that role like a glove. Like the giant amoeba it is, MS absorbed yet another company and the PC gamers (yours truly included) who had been waiting for years for Halo could rest assured that the X-box players were going to be able to play the game first, and iirc about a year before it was released for PC.
Flash forward about a decade, and here we are. Even though there is no debate that FPSs are best played on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, the console versions outsell the PC counterparts by miles. If I've been a bit bitter about stuff in my previous updates, I'm really pissed off about this. I can't believe I'm sitting here typing this stuff like some sort of doomsday prophet. Microsoft, consoles and frat dudes playing Halo can't be held solely responsible for the state of video games today though, of course pirates play a big role as well as PC games are easy to pirate. If you really want to, pirating console games for most of the current generation of consoles is not particularily hard either. It just seems very stupid that PC games lose basic features such as leaning in FPSs, proper surround sound etc just because of them being little more than straight console ports. I guess money talks and rules this world, which is true for video games as much as for everything else. Also I suppose people in general are just too stupid to realize that aiming with an analog stick is not very good and pretty much impossible if you don't have any sort of auto aim. I don't know what the solution is either, I do think games like Mega Man 9-10 and Super Meat Boy is a step in the right direction though. Games are not one hundred percent about graphics and 3D, when push comes to shove it's the gameplay that counts.
Peace out!
The first time I played video games for real was when I played Ice Climbers on NES. For a long time consoles really helped to shape what we have come to know as video games and its genres. So it feels really strange and ironic that today I believe consoles are responsible for dumbing down video games as a whole and sort of restricting what comes out and is available to play.
In the late 90's a really hyped FPS that was coming out for the PC was one named Halo, developed by Bungie, a company at that point mostly known for the FPS Marathon for Mac. One of the selling points of Halo was that you would be able to drive around in vehicles in the game, which sounds silly today but at that time it was the coolest feature imaginable. The incredibly tedious buggy part of Half-Life 2 is there because of this. As the release date for Halo was getting closer however, some things were stirring in the pot that was going to cause a ripple effect resulting in what is today known as consolitis. The Face of Evil, Cthulhu Arisen, also known as Bill Gates and his company Microsoft was not far from releasing their first console X-box. What the console lacked was a good game to sort of flagship its release, and Halo fit that role like a glove. Like the giant amoeba it is, MS absorbed yet another company and the PC gamers (yours truly included) who had been waiting for years for Halo could rest assured that the X-box players were going to be able to play the game first, and iirc about a year before it was released for PC.
Flash forward about a decade, and here we are. Even though there is no debate that FPSs are best played on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, the console versions outsell the PC counterparts by miles. If I've been a bit bitter about stuff in my previous updates, I'm really pissed off about this. I can't believe I'm sitting here typing this stuff like some sort of doomsday prophet. Microsoft, consoles and frat dudes playing Halo can't be held solely responsible for the state of video games today though, of course pirates play a big role as well as PC games are easy to pirate. If you really want to, pirating console games for most of the current generation of consoles is not particularily hard either. It just seems very stupid that PC games lose basic features such as leaning in FPSs, proper surround sound etc just because of them being little more than straight console ports. I guess money talks and rules this world, which is true for video games as much as for everything else. Also I suppose people in general are just too stupid to realize that aiming with an analog stick is not very good and pretty much impossible if you don't have any sort of auto aim. I don't know what the solution is either, I do think games like Mega Man 9-10 and Super Meat Boy is a step in the right direction though. Games are not one hundred percent about graphics and 3D, when push comes to shove it's the gameplay that counts.
Peace out!
söndag 6 mars 2011
Game review sites
Hi!
I've not been doing an update the latest couple of days because I've been busy playing local IRL Magic tournaments. I'm not really playing a lot of video games right now besides the ones I've gone through in the last few updates, but I thought I'd talk about one of the reasons why I started this blog, namely the infamous video game sites that you can find on the good 'ol Intarwebz. When I play a game that either really impresses me, or on the opposite really lets me down, I feel some kind of urge or whatever to tell this to the rest of the world. So for a period a number of years ago I would often go to Gamespot and write a review. Two years or so ago though I bought the Orange box by Valve, only to get to play this Team Fortress 2 game a lot of people talk about as a really good game. FPS is my favorite genre by some amount and I think Half-Life is certainly among the top five games ever created. So TF2 has to be great, right?
As it turns out however, TF2 is little more than a mediocre game, pretty much Counter-Strike for children with wacky and colorful graphics. I was not very impressed, in fact I think the original Team Fortress mod for HL is a better game, only the graphics obviously are not up to par nowadays. So long story short I wrote a review at GS for the game, pretty much bashing it even though I gave it like a 5.0 which should be mediocre, but obviously is very bad since everything under 9.0 is bad and not a game you want to buy. After a while my review gets taken down from the site for "trolling" or something along those lines, even though I was perfectly honest. So I stopped writing user reviews at that site and wanted to delete my account. Which the site says is not possible since the "deletion tool" is not currently working. Right.
The problem with sites like Gamespot is that they probably are paid by the game companies to give the latest Call of Duty a 9+ rating (and don't get me wrong I get the Call of Duty games on release day, I'm just not sure they deserve that kind of rating), and that their target audience is 14 year olds. It's pretty sad when an innovative game like Muramasa - the Demon Blade gets around a 6-7 rating and a very negative sounding review, and the latest CoD or Madden game always get 9+ and raving reviews like "AWESOME IMMERSIVE CINEMATIC GAMEPLAY". Muramasa gets pirated to hell and back and doesn't sell well, while CoD sells for new record numbers every annual release. This partially has to do with the consolization of video games which is another topic entirely. Right now I use IGN for game news which is not perfect but fine enough. Nobody reads the user reviews on there though so it feels pretty pointless to bother.
Until next time, signing off
I've not been doing an update the latest couple of days because I've been busy playing local IRL Magic tournaments. I'm not really playing a lot of video games right now besides the ones I've gone through in the last few updates, but I thought I'd talk about one of the reasons why I started this blog, namely the infamous video game sites that you can find on the good 'ol Intarwebz. When I play a game that either really impresses me, or on the opposite really lets me down, I feel some kind of urge or whatever to tell this to the rest of the world. So for a period a number of years ago I would often go to Gamespot and write a review. Two years or so ago though I bought the Orange box by Valve, only to get to play this Team Fortress 2 game a lot of people talk about as a really good game. FPS is my favorite genre by some amount and I think Half-Life is certainly among the top five games ever created. So TF2 has to be great, right?
As it turns out however, TF2 is little more than a mediocre game, pretty much Counter-Strike for children with wacky and colorful graphics. I was not very impressed, in fact I think the original Team Fortress mod for HL is a better game, only the graphics obviously are not up to par nowadays. So long story short I wrote a review at GS for the game, pretty much bashing it even though I gave it like a 5.0 which should be mediocre, but obviously is very bad since everything under 9.0 is bad and not a game you want to buy. After a while my review gets taken down from the site for "trolling" or something along those lines, even though I was perfectly honest. So I stopped writing user reviews at that site and wanted to delete my account. Which the site says is not possible since the "deletion tool" is not currently working. Right.
The problem with sites like Gamespot is that they probably are paid by the game companies to give the latest Call of Duty a 9+ rating (and don't get me wrong I get the Call of Duty games on release day, I'm just not sure they deserve that kind of rating), and that their target audience is 14 year olds. It's pretty sad when an innovative game like Muramasa - the Demon Blade gets around a 6-7 rating and a very negative sounding review, and the latest CoD or Madden game always get 9+ and raving reviews like "AWESOME IMMERSIVE CINEMATIC GAMEPLAY". Muramasa gets pirated to hell and back and doesn't sell well, while CoD sells for new record numbers every annual release. This partially has to do with the consolization of video games which is another topic entirely. Right now I use IGN for game news which is not perfect but fine enough. Nobody reads the user reviews on there though so it feels pretty pointless to bother.
Until next time, signing off
torsdag 3 mars 2011
Crysis 2 Demo
Hello!
Yesterday I downloaded the demo for Crysis 2 that I found out about from a site that should not be named. Ok I found out about it from /v/ on 4chan. You definitely have to take the good with the bad at that place, but it is a good place for tips about new video games. Crysis has long been the defining game to judge wether your computer is up to par, as it at least for its time had very detailed graphics that demands a lot from your computer. I can safely say that my rig is about a year old now and was pretty much the shit back then, and Crysis certainly did not run completely smooth when maxed out on all graphics settings. On the other hand, I suppose partly because the game was somewhat old by then, in my opinion it didn't look that nice or detailed. A game like Resident Evil 5 I think certainly looks better even though technically Crysis might have more polygons or whatever. Even more to the point is that it wasn't that good of a game, some silly macho marines in stupid-looking suits fighting north koreans that speak english with an accent (?). Now I've never been to North Korea so I can't verify that the random disposable henchmen do not actually speak english with accents, but somehow I doubt it.
Back to the part deux of Crysis, it appears the demo is for the multiplayer part of the game. No matter how much they try to innovate with your combat suit having different abilities such as a cloak and an armor mode, it still is at the core the same old FPS multiplayer game that it feels like you've played hundreds of times before. This particular one is clearly inspired by MW2/the latest Call of Duty installation. The gameplay is very fast paced, even though you seemingly are supposed to be working as a team that doesn't really work very well because of the way the maps look. There are just too many open spaces and it's too difficult to cover all directions, and the way the weapons work if you catch someone off guard it's almost impossible for the other guy to react and shoot back before he's dead. Oh well, I guess outing number two for Crysis is just as much of a lithmus test for testing how a computer handles graphics as the first one, so the gameplay is not really what is most important to the makers of the game. There is still hope though, Battlefield 3 is coming out I guess not soon, I think late 2011, but a gameplay trailer was recently released and it looks awesome (better than Crysis 2).
Peace out!
Yesterday I downloaded the demo for Crysis 2 that I found out about from a site that should not be named. Ok I found out about it from /v/ on 4chan. You definitely have to take the good with the bad at that place, but it is a good place for tips about new video games. Crysis has long been the defining game to judge wether your computer is up to par, as it at least for its time had very detailed graphics that demands a lot from your computer. I can safely say that my rig is about a year old now and was pretty much the shit back then, and Crysis certainly did not run completely smooth when maxed out on all graphics settings. On the other hand, I suppose partly because the game was somewhat old by then, in my opinion it didn't look that nice or detailed. A game like Resident Evil 5 I think certainly looks better even though technically Crysis might have more polygons or whatever. Even more to the point is that it wasn't that good of a game, some silly macho marines in stupid-looking suits fighting north koreans that speak english with an accent (?). Now I've never been to North Korea so I can't verify that the random disposable henchmen do not actually speak english with accents, but somehow I doubt it.
Back to the part deux of Crysis, it appears the demo is for the multiplayer part of the game. No matter how much they try to innovate with your combat suit having different abilities such as a cloak and an armor mode, it still is at the core the same old FPS multiplayer game that it feels like you've played hundreds of times before. This particular one is clearly inspired by MW2/the latest Call of Duty installation. The gameplay is very fast paced, even though you seemingly are supposed to be working as a team that doesn't really work very well because of the way the maps look. There are just too many open spaces and it's too difficult to cover all directions, and the way the weapons work if you catch someone off guard it's almost impossible for the other guy to react and shoot back before he's dead. Oh well, I guess outing number two for Crysis is just as much of a lithmus test for testing how a computer handles graphics as the first one, so the gameplay is not really what is most important to the makers of the game. There is still hope though, Battlefield 3 is coming out I guess not soon, I think late 2011, but a gameplay trailer was recently released and it looks awesome (better than Crysis 2).
Peace out!
onsdag 2 mars 2011
Duels of the Planeswalkers
Yo!
I play the trading card game Magic: The Gathering regularily IRL, which made me get Duels of the Planeswalkers for X-box 360. Prior to the game's release it was hyped a lot and for some reason I thought it was going to be a pretty extensive game like the old Shandalar Magic game for PC. In that one you would walk around and battle mages to gain new cards, RPG-style. So when I first played Duels of the Planeswalkers I was a bit dissapointed since the game is a bit limited when it comes to customizing your deck and such.
I like to grind playing the game in order to try to win seemingly unwinnable situations, to win with horrible decks against really good ones (the last "boss" deck in the latest DLC is what I'm thinking about, Sorin Markov). Even though the decks are pretty simple for the most part, and since I don't have X-box Live I only play against the computer, you actually become better at Magic from playing this game. I used to think that the computer is slightly worse than the average human Magic player you play against IRL at FNM or prerelease level, but I would argue that it's actually better. One of the most common mistake, if not the most common at least when it comes to limited and sealed deck in particular, is that people don't attack enough. The computer at Planeswalker difficulty is not particularily smart, but it always attacks when it has an advantageous board position.
Signing off,
I play the trading card game Magic: The Gathering regularily IRL, which made me get Duels of the Planeswalkers for X-box 360. Prior to the game's release it was hyped a lot and for some reason I thought it was going to be a pretty extensive game like the old Shandalar Magic game for PC. In that one you would walk around and battle mages to gain new cards, RPG-style. So when I first played Duels of the Planeswalkers I was a bit dissapointed since the game is a bit limited when it comes to customizing your deck and such.
I like to grind playing the game in order to try to win seemingly unwinnable situations, to win with horrible decks against really good ones (the last "boss" deck in the latest DLC is what I'm thinking about, Sorin Markov). Even though the decks are pretty simple for the most part, and since I don't have X-box Live I only play against the computer, you actually become better at Magic from playing this game. I used to think that the computer is slightly worse than the average human Magic player you play against IRL at FNM or prerelease level, but I would argue that it's actually better. One of the most common mistake, if not the most common at least when it comes to limited and sealed deck in particular, is that people don't attack enough. The computer at Planeswalker difficulty is not particularily smart, but it always attacks when it has an advantageous board position.
Signing off,
tisdag 1 mars 2011
Super Meat Boy
Captain's log, stardate 20110301.
I've been playing Super Meat Boy quite a bit lately, my aim is to get A+ on all of the levels including the dark world, although I doubt I will have the patience to attain this goal. It's a really nice game though, one that grows on you. When I first played the demo I didn't like it that much, I thought it was little more than a slightly easier I Wanna Be The Guy with better graphics. The main reason for this though I think is that the level selection for the demo was not very good. In the real game you get a very smooth introduction to the mechanics, only ever so slightly raising the difficulty level. In the demo some levels were a bit too hard for a new player. This is probably not much of an issue though since the game is relatively very cheap and has a lot of replay value with unlocking characters, achievements etc.
I want to live up to the title of this blog though by going over a few things that bug me with SMB. I think the main one is the "class" of enemies that shoot homing projectiles at you. It is the stages with these guys, either the missile shooting ones or their even more evil counterparts, the black gates to hell that shoot what I can only describe as langoliers, that feels the most unfair. Sure, you can avoid at least the missiles fairly easy, but there is something fundamentally wrong about you not being able to defeat these enemies in one way or another. Even when you finish the level they're still around. Another small thing is that you can't always hold down the run-button, since doing so makes meat boy fly faster through the air. I'm pretty sure SMB is the first platform game that works like this, which is not that weird considering it makes absolutely no logic sense. In Super Mario Bros always holding down B to run is default, there is no downside to doing it, but you often have to let it go in Super Meat Boy which - on the upside - makes for a more complex game experience. It takes a bit getting used to though, or in the game's terms, a few thousand messy deaths.
Gaming wise it's looking a bit dry with new games right now for me, I'm probably not getting the new Pokémon even though I've played all of them for DS up until now. I have a lot of other gaming-related topics to discuss though so I'm pretty sure I won't run out of stuff to write about in the near future.
Peace Out!
I've been playing Super Meat Boy quite a bit lately, my aim is to get A+ on all of the levels including the dark world, although I doubt I will have the patience to attain this goal. It's a really nice game though, one that grows on you. When I first played the demo I didn't like it that much, I thought it was little more than a slightly easier I Wanna Be The Guy with better graphics. The main reason for this though I think is that the level selection for the demo was not very good. In the real game you get a very smooth introduction to the mechanics, only ever so slightly raising the difficulty level. In the demo some levels were a bit too hard for a new player. This is probably not much of an issue though since the game is relatively very cheap and has a lot of replay value with unlocking characters, achievements etc.
I want to live up to the title of this blog though by going over a few things that bug me with SMB. I think the main one is the "class" of enemies that shoot homing projectiles at you. It is the stages with these guys, either the missile shooting ones or their even more evil counterparts, the black gates to hell that shoot what I can only describe as langoliers, that feels the most unfair. Sure, you can avoid at least the missiles fairly easy, but there is something fundamentally wrong about you not being able to defeat these enemies in one way or another. Even when you finish the level they're still around. Another small thing is that you can't always hold down the run-button, since doing so makes meat boy fly faster through the air. I'm pretty sure SMB is the first platform game that works like this, which is not that weird considering it makes absolutely no logic sense. In Super Mario Bros always holding down B to run is default, there is no downside to doing it, but you often have to let it go in Super Meat Boy which - on the upside - makes for a more complex game experience. It takes a bit getting used to though, or in the game's terms, a few thousand messy deaths.
Gaming wise it's looking a bit dry with new games right now for me, I'm probably not getting the new Pokémon even though I've played all of them for DS up until now. I have a lot of other gaming-related topics to discuss though so I'm pretty sure I won't run out of stuff to write about in the near future.
Peace Out!
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