LeMU.waterbottle

The week­end was quite lit­er­ally a doze of eupho­ria as I’ve waited for far too long.  I grew tired of the end­less streams of game­play videos, media pre­views, or even offi­cial blogs as they no longer sat­isfy my hunger.  After play­ing Guild Wars 2’s Beta Week­end Event, I now feel tran­quil (or per­haps, withdrawal?)

Peo­ple say a pic­ture is worth a thou­sands of words, and I say a week­end of play­ing is worth a thou­sands of game­play videos.  So before I say any­thing neg­a­tive, I just want to point that that: It was a pleasure.

Now get­ting to the point… In this BWE I played only one character–a Charr Engi­neer of Iron Legion–and put all my time into the vast PvE con­tent  (any­one sur­prised?  Yes, I’m a carebearcat).  Though the per­sonal story (main story quest chain) ends at lv20 in this beta, I some­how got to lv27… mostly by casu­ally attend­ing dynamic events and com­plete local quests.  Although the beta expe­ri­ence still upholds my gen­eral expec­ta­tion to Guild Wars 2, there are sev­eral major issues, dis­cussed below the cut, that must be addressed by the developers.

con­tinue reading…

After years of wait­ing, TERA is finally open­ing its doors to North Amer­i­can play­ers.  This game has been quite news­wor­thy lately: Not only it has promised a com­bat sys­tem of the next gen­er­a­tion of MMO, its his­tory of con­tro­ver­sies both in its coun­try of ori­gin and here in the States attracted a lot of media atten­tion within the MMO sphere.  Yet no amount of good hype, bad press, and other kinds of con­tro­ver­sies will deter the Tera’s impend­ing launch­ing on May 1st, whose suc­cess will then depend on the game’s real qual­ity rather than any pass­ing of words.  As the final beta period wraps up past week­end, it is time to pass­ing down some ver­dicts in before the game goes live.

con­tinue reading…

Bat­tle­field 3 received a big patch a month ago which rebal­anced a tons of stuff.  Good to know that most changes are pos­i­tive, but I then had to read­just play style to the post-patch game­play.  Many acces­sories on guns act dif­fer­ently post-patch.  I had to dig around the wall-of-text patch note on my own, and then con­duct much test­ing that I WISH THIS ARTICLE WAS THERE BEFORE I HAD TO DO THAT.

http://blogs.battlefield.com/2012/04/inside-dice-perfect-setup/

READ IT. IT WILL HELP YOU! (Espe­cially if you want to be a lazy ass like me

Spring!  New anime sea­son!  It’s unload­ing the old gear and pick­ing up the new ones for me… so nat­u­rally, a recap and pre­view needs to hap­pen.  Although I’m not reliv­ing the past when I was fol­low­ing 11 anime at the same time, this spring does offer quite a few new con­cepts while say­ing farewell (and some­thing less cour­te­ous) to the con­cluded ones.

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The “Dis­graced” Mittani

The Eve Fan­fest, hosted by CCP, is a yearly offline gath­er­ing (and drink­ing) event in the city of Reyk­javik, Ice­land.  It’s always been sur­pris­ing for me, given CCP’s record of gen­er­at­ing “con­tro­ver­sies” among its play­ers, yet each year’s Fan­fest turned out to be a fab­u­lous expe­ri­ence for all: CCP, the atten­ders, and the ordi­nary play­ers and other media out­lets.  There was no real-life ver­sion of rant­ing thread­naughts at inter­ac­tions between the devel­op­ers and atten­ders, nor there was equiv­a­lence of Jita Protest at the con­ven­tion cen­ter (that I know of any­way).  It kinda makes sense, as who would really pay for a round trip to Ice­land to protest about a game that they would have stopped play­ing already.  Instead of the ten­sion between CCP and us Eve play­ers, we get excit­ing news about what’s com­ing to our beloved game–for exam­ple, Fan­fest 2012 has brought us one of the best Eve con­cept trail­ers.

The frag­ile tran­quil­ity has been bro­ken at this year’s Fan­fest.  To my sur­prise, though, not by a group of “bit­ter­vets” vent­ing their anger at CCP.  The offender is The Mit­tani, chair­man of the newly elected CSM mem­ber who received more votes than the next three can­di­dates com­bined, for his gross mis­con­duct  as he dis­played the other extreme neg­a­tiv­ity that this game’s com­mu­nity is often accused of–the sadis­tic wish onto another Eve player.

con­tinue reading…

DUST 514 Video Game, GDC 2012: Game To Game Inter­ac­tion Inter­view HD | Video Clip | Game Trail­ers & Videos | GameTrailers.com.

Damn.  Even though I don’t plan to get a PS3 but this game indeed excites me.  I don’t know how many free-to-play FPS games are on PS3 but I would def­i­nitely check it out if I have a PS3.  And as an Eve fan, I’m oblig­ated to demand a PC release of this game some­time within a year of its con­sole debut :p