So, what did YOU do geeky this week? Here’s what some of us at E-G have been doing to keep geeky during the summer.
Jesse Baguchinsky
This week I went out of town on a mini vacation to visit my parents and friends in Southwest Florida. However, being the geeks we are, chose to skip the normal outdoor activities one does on a vacation on the coast and played video games instead. I finally picked up Uncharted 2 and I believe I am almost finished with the single player campaign. Most of my other friends opted to pick up Starcraft 2 and have been playing that.
Also, I was introduced to The Big Bang Theory. So far I have finished the first season and I am craving more.
Randy Yasenchak
I’ve been hard at work on the upcoming Call of Duty Retrospective that we announced over the weekend. I’m really excited about working on these videos and I hope everyone is going to enjoy the results. I’ve topped off replaying the first COD and I’m close to wrapping up the expansion so with any luck the first episode in the series will be out sooner than we realize.
Oh yea! In site news, we’ll be at MAGFest 2011 for sure! I signed up the site a few weeks ago. I’m even more excited about the show this year than I was last year, probably because I know more of what to expect.
Chris Vand
My week thus far has consisted of a little more StarCraft II, along with a dose of World of Warcraft. Since I completely skipped the last two years of WoW, I decided to see if the questing I missed had improved. My friends said it had a great deal…however it was largely still the same: kill this many of those, collect this, run over here etc. LIARS! This was just a plot to get me back into the game. Luckily for me though, this expansion is nearing an end so there’s no competitive race in content and the gear and all that stuff is kind of pointless. Much harder to get hooked.
Other than that, I’m in the planning stages for a new PC! I can’t wait for this to become a reality. My current rig can’t even play Bad Company 2 and has to play SC2 on some really weak settings. This will also allow me to get my geek on in music production and video editing. Needless to say, the future has a very joyous moment in waiting.
Robin Meijer
I’m still playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope, but with only an hour of playtime a day, I’m not progressing nearly as fast as I’d like to. Maybe that’s for the best though… since I don’t have to sit through so many of it’s incredibly shitty cutscenes if I don’t play so much. At one point during the development process of the English version of this game, SOMEBODY must have noticed that the voice-overs were TERRIBLE.
Aside from that, I picked up Army of Two: The Fortieth Day yesterday, and must say that I’m genuinely surprised about this game. The level design is great, the emphasis on co-op is rad, weapon customization is pretty neat and most importantly, there are just an incredible amount of people to shoot. So in short, it’s everything the first game wasn’t. Unfortunately, the game fumbles by assigning almost all actions to the same button (dashing into cover from a distance is the same button as vaulting over cover if you’re close to it). And for some reason, there is no way to control the audio or turn on subtitles. Voices are generally pretty soft and I can’t follow the story line at all… not that I expect to be blown away by it, but more because I’d really like to understand why I’m shooting all these people.
Gavin Greene
Mon amour....
This week saw me getting back into a daily gaming flow for the first time in months. With a combination of trying to just pass the last classes so I can finally get my degree and looking for the job I’ll move to right after that, the days have blended together into an opaque headache of a mess. Luckily, early on the week, I received the 16GB memory pro stick duo for my PSP, and with an hour of downloading took it down to under a gig. Safe to say that, with practically half the PSX’s good library in my pocket, I am kicking boredom’s ass.
But I am not surviving entirely on the sustenance of the nostalgia IV. Gamefly’s sent me the surprisingly decent Saw: The Videogame, and in between sessions with Jigsaw I made New Super Mario Bros. and Professor Layton and the Curious Village my bitch(es). But the best summary possible of these past few days is the comfort and bliss that results from curling up in my duvet and stack of pillows and going through a month of Persona 3 Portable, juggling social links and Tartarus training like the pro I am. Oh, all that and working hard on the site…..yeah……
(psst….expect a few reviews and previews coming from me in the next week or so!)
Chris, I feel for you man. That sucks that you have to play SCII on crappy settings. This week I am getting my motherboard so I can finally set up my rig to play Crysis and every other PC game I own on max settings. Also I can use it for video editing (yeah).
Well I finally signed up for Netflix, so yeah, I kinda went on a rating spree and adding movies to my ques. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, awesome movie, as well as Black Dynamite. Both awesome movies. For gaming wise I finished Zombie Island of Dr. Ned for Borderlands, and I am making progress through Armory of General Knoxx. Will get back to more SCII playing later, as well as playing Scott Pilgrim, and watching the movie. I think that is enough cred for the week.
Almost forgot this little bit. Over the last week or two I have been reading The Last Wish; the first Witcher book in English (US version if you must know). I like it, but there are some parts that are just unoriginal but his takes on those things are enjoyable. If you must know, the parts I am talking about are: [spoiler]When he references Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Rumpelstiltskin. I liked his take on it, but yeah, I wanted the whole thing to be more original, however I love Geralt and all the things he does.[/spoiler]
After reading most of the first book (on Part/Chapter 6; yeah weird layout) I have a few points about the game, and will talk about them in spoiler tags. [spoiler] The only way to make Geralt work in the game is to give him amnesia, otherwise if CDProjeck made Geralt Artificially weak, then it would have been better for them to make you play as Leo, as he is a fledgling Witcher. So far reading the books, I don’t know how Geralt got amnesia (if he gets it at all), but I would hope to learn if it happens in one of the three books (third book isn’t released until 2011 in US). Oh, just wanted to point out that the intro to the game is for the most part exactly how that fight happened in the book, with Geralt turning Adda from a Striga into a princess (not back, as she was born a striga; not spoiling anything).[/spoiler]
This is why we need an edit button, not for language but for forgotten ideas, so we don’t have to reply to ourselves.
No edit buttons ever, Keck. Just double check what you write before you post.
I understand, but sometimes you forget stuff when you post, especially when you post a wall of text. I just want to know why no edit button; is it so you can’t exploit the filter, cause if that is the reason, then I understand, but I need a reason, a justified reason, and not getting the run around.
Hmm, let’s see.
I’ve beaten Fallout 3. That game has one of the most anti-climatic endings i’ve seen in a long time. Liberty Prime just gets stuck with EVERYTHING. Then, you convince end boss to run away using your painfully written “speech check” dialogue. And then you get even less endings than FO1. Ugh. The people at GDC who gave FO3 the “best script” award should just shoot themselves in the head. I can’t see a single good thing about this game, other than its modding capabilities. Having played FO1 and FO2 a few weeks before playing FO3, there’s just no doubt in my mind. The game’s a trainwreck.
Other than that, i’m spending my time modeling naked super heroes, drawing sci-fi guns ’till my hand hurts and writing design docs.
I guess in WoW you didn’t do the training your hawk questline or any of the quests where you get to ride on the back of storm giants or giant golems and reak pure havoc…
Blizz has come a long way in terms of questing, and the questflow and quest design is vastly improved from TBC to Wrath… but really… in the end, any quest in any rpg is going to amount to one of the following at its base level:
Escort this here
Kill # of this
Collect # of this
Protect this
Take this to
So I mean, no, if you look at the most base level, the questing will basically be the same… in any rpg… but its how that integrates into the story, how it flows, and how badly repetetive it feels… and wrath feels better than tbc which feels better than classic…. so they’ve definitely improved by leaps and bounds.
I did riding on dragon stuff and shooting canons etc. For someone who played WoW as much as me it wasn’t enough, and frankly didn’t entertain me very long. Yes, an MMORPG “CAN” and almost always has all the stuff you listed.
However, it’s possible to take a completely different rout and tailor a leveling experience in an way that’s similar to a single player RPG in which the story is carrying you, not generic quests.
When I played Knights of the Old Republic, I wasn’t thinking about my next level. They just happened amidst an awesome story. That’s what I want to experience in an MMORPG. A deep and engaging leveling experience where you’re not consumed by the constant awareness of needing to get the next point of experience.
All I see when I level in WoW is my experience bar, and I’ll do whatever it takes to level faster to 80, which means battleground weekends, and queued 5-man instances while I quest.
To be honest… I’ve never felt like I was ‘just looking at my experience bar’… and I’ve never played a bioware game where the story mattered in the least bit to me, I’ve always just felt bored with their stories… in WoW, except for a few brief periods where I WAS just trying to get that last few levels(in classic when I leveled my first 60… I was so eager to start raiding with my guild that I just wanted to get to 60).
So I guess its all on a personal level, the experience. I find Bioware does a TERRIBLE job of making me feel involved in the story, of making me feel integrated. It just bores me. Whereas I’ve always felt involved in WoW, and with every expansion I feel significantly moreso than the last. So maybe its just the approach and personal style, but for me I find Blizzard does a 50000000 times(and I typed that number very deliberately, not as an exaggeration) better job of integrating the story and making me not carea bout the leveling itself but rather the experience and the questing than Bioware does…
I respect your views, even if they’re the opposite :-)!