What You Did There; I See It.

I realize it’s been a long time since my last update. My apologies; sometimes it turns out life gets totally and completely amazing, and things like non-paying gaming news blogs fall on the backburner over things like, y’know, working on things that actually pay me, prepping for Burning Man, and generally having the time of my life. You understand.

It being the Fourth of July, I’m of course writing this in my swim trunks on the shore of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire, sipping on a Corona in the shade. I hope all of you in the US are enjoying your holidays, and all of you outside of the US are wishing you were here, blowing shit up and being patriotic. Suck it.

That said, there have been a lot of developments in the gaming world, and I’ll do what I can to at least touch up on some of them real soon. In the meantime, here’s a snippet from a review I had sent in to The Escapist for publication after PAX East that didn’t get printed. No idea why. Oh well.

Either way, if you have an iPad, check out this game – it’s pretty awesome.
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It ain’t easy being an indie game developer. Even with major strides being made in terms of digital distribution, there is still the question of market exposure. With a massive event like PAX East, it’s common and understandable for major industry players to dominate the scene. They have the money and the sway to purchase vast display booths in prominent locations, as well as the marketing clout to seed the minds of the general public, and thus exert a certain level of control to guarantee at least some press coverage.

In recognition of this, I made sure to check out the various indie games abound at PAX East this year. In doing so, I managed to find some of the more clever and enjoyable games I’ve seen up for release this year.

One of my favorites was New World Colony, an iPad turn-based strategy game coming from Cambridge, MA-based 82Apps. It’s considered a mash-up of Settlers of Catan, Risk, and Civilization, drawing on the unique benefits of all three to fill in the holes left by each. The board is a randomly generated hex pattern of land types, and the tiles are arranged in such a manner that no player will guarantee themselves an opening advantage. Each turn, players will seek to obtain and defend various resource types and then use said resources to build establishments (granaries, mines, shipyards and the like), defend, and attack.

The game contains a fairly interesting Market system, in which players can barter their own resources in exchange for others. The kicker in this is that the system is a starvation economy – there are only so many of any given resource available in the game. True to supply and demand, the less of a resource there is, the more expensive it becomes – going so far as the per-trade level. This allows a clever player to starve out his opponent of a given resource, possibly turning the tides in a battle.

The game is playable on a single iPad, and will recognize player orientation around a table and adjust its display according to who’s turn it currently is. “I want it to feel like a board game,” says Erik Asmussen, developer and founder of 82Apps. It can also be played online via game center integration.

New World Colony has three game modes – Normal, Pacifist, and Warlord, each catering to a different playstyle. 82Apps is tailoring Player Vs. Computer games to be somewhere between 20-30 minutes, with a little leeway with solely human players.

All told, the game looks engaging and promising. My only complaint, as expected, is that I can’t get it on the Android platform, and as a result, I can’t really play it (I don’t see myself buying an iPad anytime soon).

New World Colony is purchasable from the iTunes app store for $0.99.

Here we are, at the end of another PAX East, alive and whole (well, save for that little empty space in our heart of hearts that we feel at the end of PAX). I have a lot of thoughts to unload, but to form them in a reasonable and legible fashion tonight would be an effort in futility, so you’ll all have to wait.

“But wait,” you may ask, “for what are we waiting?” (See what I did there? Bite me, dangling prepositions.) Well, today I decided to approach the day (with the exception of checking out the Portal 2 video) from the angle of seeing, playing, and learning about games that I didn’t know about before PAX. I hit up a lot of the indie and/or first-release games on the floor, completely forsaking the Sunday panels. A few highlights:

• Super Giant Games‘ enchantingly beautiful role-playing action game Bastion
• Trapdoor‘s hilariously bloody Warp
• Does Nintendo’s 3DS work with people with Strabismus?
• Retro Affect‘s clever and addictive Snapshot
• 82 Apps‘ lovely Civ-meets-Catan-meets-Risk-like iPad game, New World Colony
• last but certainly not least, Owlchemy Labs‘ Smuggle Truck, an iPad physics/accelerometer game about smuggling immigrants into the US (no shit.)

I look forward to filling you all in on what went down over the weekend, uploading pics, and getting some discussion going. In the meantime, what were your favorite parts about PAX this year? Least favorite? Why? Let me know!

Quick post from the PAX East media room – Day 2 has gone smashingly well thus far. A quick list:

• Got some good interviews in (keep your eyes peeled!)
• Didn’t come close to getting into the Rage demo (damn you, insane lines!)
• played Ubisoft‘s new Kinect-centric Child of Eden (beautiful)
• saw some really great cosplay (super cool stuff, really)
• didn’t get enough food (need to remedy that soon)
• snagged an invite to the Bioware meetup (heading to that in mere minutes)

I’ll keep updates coming as I have them! Stay tuned! Also, if you’re at PAX East and want to meet up/get drunk/know of a good party, add me on Twitter and say hi!

First and foremost, my apologies for the long silence – I spent the majority of the last several months as the primary news editor for WarCry, which kinda ate up most (read: all) of my spare time. The downside: that job is now gone. The upside: I have (a little) more spare time. That is neither here nor there, however. Far more important (and relevant) is the fact that our long wait for Boston’s new annual gaming convention is back!

That’s right everyone, PAX East is finally here! I’m there once again (living in Boston, I really have no excuse) and will be reporting on the event and all its glory for The Escapist, and whatever I write that they don’t deem fit to run, I’ll post here (a guy’s gotta make a living somehow, yo). I’ll also post links to what does make it to The E. I’ve got some cool interviews and demos planned for tomorrow (more on those later), so stay tuned for some more updates!

I will warn you all now – the next two days may be a little “burst-y”, but it’s either that, or “when I get around to it”, and I’d rather give you content than not. A few teasers of what’s to come, however -

• Thoughts on Friday’s keynote from Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
• Demiurge‘s new indie game, Shoot Many Robots!
• Gamers Doing Good – How We use Games to Make Life Better for Others panel
• Portal 2
• 3DS hands-on from someone with a lazy eye (behind the curve on this one, I know, but hey, time’s tight these days, and I gotta “see” it for myself, ba-dum-CHH)
• wtf is it with all those damn Magic cards-as-swag at every fucking con ever????
• and MORE!!!

You know you love it. If you want to meet up sometime over the weekend at PAX East for a game of Fluxx (I *always* have a deck on me) or a beer (or three), tweet at me or something; all my social media contacts are on the right sidebar. I’ll leave you with a rad photo of me taken by Averna over at NerfThisDruid:

God I love my life.

First and foremost – PAX East photos! I’m notoriously terrible at remembering that I have a camera when I’m having fun, so I apologize that this small bundle is all I have to offer.

Quick and easy link to the photoset can be found here.

So PAX East – I loved it. There were aspects that were terrible, certainly (*cough* most panels *cough* – I’ll rant about the Girls On Gaming panel soon), but the sights, sounds, and pure gaming fun? Can’t be beat, and I can’t wait for next year. As everyone has already said, the Hynes Convention Center was a terrible location for such an event, but they tried and did what they could. The location was right (right smack dab in the middle of Boston Proper), but the failing was just that the convention hall didn’t have the customization required for such an event. The preexisting halls were too small to contain even a fraction of the people who wanted to be present for a given panel, and I foolishly spent the majority of the first day learning that it wasn’t really worth trying to get into any of them. Once I took that to heart and got to the wandering and sporadic gaming, I had a blast. Next year I expect will be even better.

Oh, and I totally would have OWNED the RB2 tourney had I decided to compete. Winning song was freakin’ Bad Romance. No shit. Come ON.

A few high points of PAX East for me:

• Competing in the Portal challenge – a brand new map incorporating anti-gravity and concluding with cake (!!). Completion entered me into a raffle for an Alienware machine, but I did not win. Bah.
• Playing Fluxx with my guildies – What do you do at a gaming convention? Play games, of course! There were long hallways full of awesome beanbags where we camped ourselves and played Fluxx and Bang! (though I never got a chance to play Bang!, it looked fun).
• Limbo demo - Limbo will be hitting the xbox live arcade sometime this summer, and it looks amazing. Dark, foreboding, simple in concept yet complex in execution. You play a small shadow boy in a dark forest world filled with numerous gruesome deaths, and you try to avoid them. That’s about all I was able to figure out from a few moments of play, but it was enough. I’ll be getting this game the day it comes out.
• Split/Second demo – This game was very, very polished, and while I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks once it releases, if I had to guess right now, my money on breakaway awesome racing hit of 2010 will still be Blur.
• D&D Multi-Touch Table – This thing is totally sick. I’d heard about this rich boy toy for a while now, but seeing it in action is something else entirely. *drool*

Tons more, for sure, but those are some of my favorites.

So one con down, another coming. In a little less than two weeks, ROFLcon will be upon us. I have a lot less guildies coming into town for this one, but I’m looking forward to seeing Eitri again, and hopefully kicking his ass at some Fluxx. I’ve glanced over the schedule a bit, but since it’s still a week and a half out, I figure a lot of it is still up in the air, and there’s no use in getting all worked up about a schedule that’s just going to change 8 times before the day comes. I’ll update more as we get a little bit closer to it (not to mention during).

Oh, and before I go – the Blur Multiplayer Beta Demo is in Open Beta status, which means that if you have an xbox 360 and a gold live account, you can download it for free. Check it out and hit me up; I’ll crush you.

This weekend, expect -

• PAX East decom post (wih pictures!)
• RB2 DLC update (Hendrix!)
• Ascended Meetup! (tons of fun, and even more beer!)
• D&D Discussion (yes, I’m starting again)
• FFXIII talk (not much, as I’m not far in)
• ROFLcon Anticipation (less than a month!)
• Lich King 10m update (hint: still trying)

and MORE! You’ll see; it’ll be rad.

First things first – if you have an xbox 360, you should see about getting yourself into the Blur Multiplayer Beta if you can. I got my code from The Escapist, via this link, though I’m not sure if they still have any available. I know that Joystiq had some as well, though I do not have the exact link at my fingertips (you could search it just as easily as I could, you lazy bastards).

It’s basically like Mario Kart (you know how much I love Mario Kart) meets Burnout Paradise, but with a leveling/skillup/loadout system. It’s super fun and I highly recommend it. I’m not sure when the beta ends (probably in a few days), but if you can get it, you should, and we should play. Also – I will crush you. My gamertag is Valiscariot. Drop me a PM on xbl and we’ll have some fun.

Second – Lady Gaga pack for RB2 coming this Tuesday. Who’s got two thumbs and is totally stoked? THIS GUY. Seriously, what a great party pack this is. I realize that it will completely kill my training for the PAX East Rock Band 2 Tournament, but I’m still not convinced I’ll participate anyway. As fun as it may be, I’m not quite convinced that I want to miss Saturday/Sunday panels because of it (not to mention the dozen or so guildies that will be in town for PAX). We’ll see.

Third – Bioshock 2 was everything I wanted it to be. Yeah, yeah, Yahtzee didn’t like it, but he doesn’t like anything – that’s his thing. It was a really good combo of old and new. Goodbye minigame of Pipe Dream, hello quicktime event that doesn’t suck (although I did find a bug in it – if you initiate the hack on a turret, and then auto-hack dart it while the quicktime screen is up, the quicktime screen stays up until you reload the game – boo!). The game was as long as I wanted it to be, the Little Sister events happened about as much as I could tolerate without getting annoyed, and there were enough Gene Tonics to make me wish I had more tonic slots. Well done. Multiplayer ended up being really, really sloppy, but fun for a while. The Sinclair Solutions addon didn’t really add anything I wanted to the game, but we’ll see what happens in the future. All in all, I’m happy.

I’ve somehow avoided buying FFXIII, and instead I’ve added it as the only game in my Gamefly queue. We’ll see how long it takes to get here. Gotta save money for PAX!

This just in! According to neowin.net, Nvidia will be unveiling it’s fastest gaming technology yet at PAX East 2010. This event just gets cooler and cooler. Who’s going? I know Averna and I are going, as are about a dozen of our guildies. Straight-up Ascended meetup! Woot! Also, given that I will be hosting a ton of guildies, I will not be registering for the BYOC option, but if you’re interested, I recommend registering ASAP – spots are very limited.

I will be updating more on this as the event gets closer, and of course, I’ll be doing what I can to update what I can about the event itself (though since we’ll be hosting a slew of guildmates, don’t expect minute-by-minute updates).

In other news, I’ve almost completed A Feast of Souls, my current quest in my Shadowmourne questline. After that, next up – a hard-ass kill of Putricide! Seeing as we’ll be banging our heads against Putricide again tonight hoping for our first kill of him on 25-man, I’d say it’s a bit away before we can do it so well we can have me in there messing around with being the Abom to get the debuff for the quest, but I’ll update as we get closer. Wish us luck!

So as I mentioned the other day, Blizzard has released the patch notes for 3.3.3 (though GhostCrawler has stated that they are not 100% complete) and there’s some big changes coming. I’m not even going to touch the massive pvp/battleground changes, ’cause hey, pvp is fun, but it’s not my big thing. I’m on a PvP server because I like the violent nature of it; I like the unsuspecting attacks, I like the “look over your shoulder” feel it gives, but at the end of the day, PvE is where my heart is; I live for the raid, for the group kill, for the exultation of a hard fight well executed. Leave the PvP change reviews to someone who lives and breathes for the PK.

First – some random stuff.

Ok, so we’ve got some simple fixes here that make life a little easier. I’m all for ‘em. Bring ‘em on. Insert more times that I say “‘em”. Onward. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I care a lot about my Unholy DK (and am at this point just amused by the fact that it’s impossible for a patch to come without a serious change to the spec), so I’ll hit on those changes.

Whoa whoa wait a second there – is that a buff, a nerf, or somewhere in the middle? Well, it sorta depends on what you do. With the physical damage increase, you’re looking at a buff on non-diseased targets. That is to say, if you use Scourge Strike against something right off the bat, it’s going to do more damage post-patch than it does now. This change should not, however, affect much for PvEers, as even though it looks like a nerf at first glance on the shadow damage, don’t forget the shadow damage is directly proportional to the physical damage, so it’s relatively the same thing (an ever-so-slight buff, actually). Both still double dip in the same ratios, and in the end, if there’s a change, you’re probably not going to notice it. If anything, you’ll notice that ArmPen is worth a tiny bit more. Don’t worry about it. In the end, this will most likely be about a 50 dps buff for you. From this post:

There are a ton of Auction House changes, which I’ll go over (read: look at) at some point in the future, but for now let’s just skip ahead to what made me omg wtf nerdrage pissed:

Yup, totally wtf pissed.

Here’s the thing – I’m in the camp of people that hates Occulus. Now, before you get all hatin’, raging at me for not knowing how to play, saying it’s easy, saying I can get all those extra badges and the mount, hear me out. I like vehicles. Which is to say, I like 2d vehicles, land vehicles. I think that the Flame Leviathan fight is super cool and fun, I think that while Wintergrasp is poorly implemented and the server architecture can’t handle it, it’s fun in concept and I like the style. 3D drake vehicle combat, however, is another thing entirely. I hated Malygos Phase 3 with a seething passion, and would have opted out of running it at all if I weren’t, y’know, the guild leader (it would have set a bad precedent, not to mention the hit on morale). The display engine just doesn’t cope well with 3-dimensional space, figuring placement not just 360º around you, but also above and below. It’s poorly designed and plays in a way that I do not find enjoyable in any way, shape, or form.

Is it easy? Totally. Can I do it? Of course. Should I have to? NO. I play this game to have fun, and Occulus is not fun, at all. I’d rather not play WoW than run Occulus. I don’t care about Triumph badges, I don’t care about mounts. I have no reason to run it, at all, and it saddens me that because Blizzard decided to make the random daily include Emblems of Frost, I’m basically forced to run one random a day in order to be a dedicated raider.

Currently, this isn’t much of an issue: if it pops, I leave, wait 15 minutes, and try again. But the above change tells me the following. First, Blizzard recognized that they had an epidemic of people leaving Occulus when it popped, so they added some extra rewards for completing it – a few extra Triumph badges and the chance at a mount. Apparently, that didn’t do enough, so now they’re taking the other route – punishment. Blizz is acting like a bad parent, first offering sweets as a reward for finishing a dry meatloaf dinner, and when that doesn’t work, threaten punishment. If you don’t run Occulus when it pops, you don’t get to run anything for half an hour. Ok, I’ll log out and go play Rock Band for half an hour. No skin off my back. At least that’s FUN.

Could I suck it up and run it? Sure, I could. I mean, it’s quick and easy, right? As I told a guildie last night, so’s your mom, but that doesn’t mean I should jump her bones. Not. The. Point. I play this game to have fun. I play this game because it IS fun. I like the grind, I like the options, I like the playstyle; hell, I’m working on Loremaster for my freakin’ Death Knight, and even though it’s tedious as all hell, I’m enjoying it a lot. Occulus does nothing for me, and I resent being extorted into running that 15-minute facepalm just because Blizzard can’t admit/accept that it’s terrible. They did as much already when they added the extra rewards for it; I’m sorry that wasn’t enough. You know what would be enough? Give us a one-minute pre-combat “grace period” upon entering an instance to leave it. Yes, you’d see people leaving groups because their teammates aren’t in T10 – I consider that an acceptable rarity, or at least an acceptable option vs punishing people who refuse to waste their time because Blizzard can’t accept that they made something that sucks.

I’m not saying it should be abolished; I’m not saying it should be removed. Shit, some people like it. You may enjoy it, and if so, kudos – I’m fine with that. Everyone is different (no two people are not on fire). But now Blizz wants to see if people will log out for half an hour when their RNG gives them that joke of a run?

You bet your ass I will. I’m just going to do so while being even more pissed that in order to be a progressive raider, I have to run content that I beat over a year ago *every day* and subject myself to the chance of that abortion of an instance or a half hour penalty? The damn things never should have given Emblems of Frost in the first place. I don’t see them changing that anytime soon, though, so I die the little death inside.

Now, again I recognize – some people really like it. I also know that a lot of devs put a lot of time and effort into it, and I respect that. The existence of the instance doesn’t bother me; the fact that I’m going to be penalized for half an hour for not wanting to run it does. I could just not do the daily random, but again – then I’m losing 14 Emblems of Frost a week, and for a serious raider (especially an Unholy DK, that needs all five pieces plus the cloak – 455 Emblems total, unless I get lucky in VoA), that’s a lot.

So that’s why I hate this change. Weak, Blizzard, really weak.

So what are your thoughts on the change? Like it? Hate it? If you’re civil, I’m down for a discussion. Whatcha got?