Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

After a delay of almost two months European Lotro-players will finally get the new patch and the transition to free to play on Tuesday 2nd November . If I was to judge the mood of the european player base it is one of feverish anticipation. I know that European players were initially disappointed at the delay  and angry at the lack of explanation from Codemasters. During the first few weeks of the delay there was almost no communication from Codemasters except for a very occasional embarrassed post from a community manger telling us nothing. Eventually we got a post from the David Solari MD of Codemasters apologising for the delay and explaining it was down to contractual issues. This was an important and necessary conciliatory measure. After that post much of the anger dissipated and the anticipation began to build again.  The preview server that was put up last week was  mobbed and had login queues of three to four hours. We have waited, how we have waited. We wan...

Codemasters are running a preview event for the long awaited European launch of f2P Lotro. I don't normally go in for beta's but they were giving free Turbine points for the final release so I downloaded the client and logged in. The preview is proving enormously popular by the way with three hour queues to get into the one server but that is another story. The thing that really caught my attention is the instant levelling mechanism that Turbine uses on beta servers. I guess Betas need an instant levelling mechanic so that players can test the full game. Turbine implements this via an inn that spawns at various locations bearing the somewhat humorous title of "The Eyes and Guard Tavern". The "Eyes and Guard" is one of the most wonderful locations I have ever been in an mmorpg. It is a gloriously chaotic place. Like Dr. Who's Tardis it is much bigger inside than it looks and its various chambers contain npcs who can instantly bestow you with powers a...

Great question posed by Stabs in a comment after my blog post in which I admitted to having bought 42 games last year and only played 13 of them thoroughly. " Do you see it as a problem that you never or briefly played so many games - are you too impulsively buying games you're not really going to play or is it still worth getting them to have a brief look? " I gave a brief answer in my own comment but I will try to expand on it here. I do try out the majority of the games I purchase and I do manage to immerse myself more completely in a small number of them. In fact once I latch on to a particular game I often immerse myself quite completely in one game for a few days,  or even a few weeks. One of my greatest gaming pleasures actually comes from completing games and once a game gets its hooks into me I will stick with it quite doggedly to the end of the main campaign. For this reason I quite like the modern trend towards shorter more intense single player games ...

In a moment of boredom I fired up a spreadsheet to try and analyse how many games I bought last year, how much I paid for them and how many of them I have actually played. There is a bit of estimation involved because I am too lazy to go back over old credit card bills but in general I think my figures are pretty sound. Please note I only include full feature games that I first acquired in the period from November 2009 to the present. I do include full featured games that I got for free but I don't include Flash games. I include mmorpgs that I either started or bought a paid expansion for during the year. Level of play is a somewhat subjective measure. Zero percent means I never even played the tutorial. 100% means I finished the main campaign of a single player or I spent a substantial amount of time in multiplayer. Please note that all of the games were legally acquired. I don't pirate games. Number of new PC Games Acquired from November 2009 to October 2010: Games f...

I think Guild Wars's skill system is terrific but it does make it harder to  get back into the game after a break.You have to select a working build from hundreds of available skills and remembering what they all do and how they interact is not easy. To make matters worse Arena net continually tweak and modify skill functions. I think they do this deliberately to keep the meta game interesting to prevent "flavour of the month" builds from becoming too dominant. I haven't played Guild Wars since April 2009 so I am completely befuddled. I have a vague notion of trying out the Eye of the North Expansion which I added to my account some time ago but never played. There is also something called the Hall of Monuments which I have heard ties in to Guild Wars 2 but about which I know little else. I have two high end characters who are probably good enough for eye of the North: a Mesmer and a Paragon. The Paragon ( a heavily armoured buffer / support class) is easier to p...

I have always enjoyed a bit of sci-fi shooter so when I discovered that Midway's Area 51 is now completely free to play I downloaded a copy from here The game got fairly lacklustre reviews when it came out in 2005 and I can understand why. It is a game that was already out of date when it was released. Area 51 doesn't do anything that Half Life, Halo and Unreal weren't doing much much earlier and the graphics and game-play are more 2001 than 2005. Happily the passing of time makes this fault seem less relevant. What the game does do it does very well and it is now possible to enjoy it much as you might enjoy any other retro game. The game-play, involving shooting a variety of humanoid and alien opponents with a selection of mundane and exotic weaponry is too familiar to warrant explanation. You do get the ability to morph into a hard hitting virus spitting mutant which provides an alternative way to play through levels without really being stronger than the normal gun...

This story is not really mine to write but if I don't write it will never be written. In any case I don't think she reads my blog too regularly so I think I'll get away with it. Despite my own obsession with PC games my beautiful wife has never really warmed to the hobby. In the early days of our relationship I tried to share my enthusiasm but "Doom" and its mass murdering ilk had no appeal for her. At one stage "Simon the Sorcerer" looked to be a minor breakthrough. She did show some interest in the game's puzzle solving  but a hobby which keeps participants up alone till  three in the morning does not mesh well with newly married bliss. For a time gaming became an uncomfortable element in our relationship. Sometimes dismissed as a foolish waste of time and sometimes challenged as an insidious  rival. Years passed. We built a life together. We built a family together. Maturity, understanding, love and trust combined to allow the freedom to pursu...

Right now I am running Lotro in a window (just watching the chat screen to see if any interesting groups come up) while playing Left 4 Dead 2 while downloading Area 51 ( Free Download, Ad Supported ) while writing this blog post. CPU usage is 10% rising to about 60% when I actually start shooting Zombies. The second screen is an old Dell monitor courtesy of my brother who recently upgraded his PC and was throwing this out. I hooked it up to my machine and I have fallen in love with dual monitors. Now that PCs are powerful enough to actually run more than one programme at a time I find it really improves productivity. When I am working I find I can review a document on one screen while typing my comments on the other. When gaming I can have a browser open on one screen while a game is being played on the other. One minor annoyance is that most games demand focus if you want to run them in full screen mode. Left 4 dead is somewhat unusual in that it has a border less windowed mode th...

Hm.... Less than a week ago I decided I had gone as far as I could comfortably go in Lotro and was  trying to decide whether to quit and wait for the next patch or to dabble in a few end game dungeons. A few days later I find I have slipped rapidly into end game mindset. I have been  running instances. I have started deliberating over incremental improvements in stats. I have refreshed my personal equipment and I have made a decent start on collecting some end game armour. Thanks entirely to the generosity of more experienced players who were willing to  show me the ropes in dungeons I have amassed 90 radiance out of the 120 radiance required for entry into the current end game raid Barad Gularan. In fact 90 radiance would already allow me into two lower tier raids "The Watcher" and "Dar Narbugud but these aren't run as often any more as attention is focussed on the main raid of BG. Perhaps the most damning evidence of my slipping into end game mindset is tha...

I have just finished Call of Juarez Bound in Blood. It is a more conventional shooter than the first game and takes fewer risks with the gameplay but it feels more polished overall. It is hard to talk about the Call of Juarez sequence however without commenting on the story telling: Some people loved it with one reviewer saying it is the "pinnacle of story telling in first person shooters " others hated it saying "The story’s a meandering mess of multiple villains, double-dealing women, faux-rugged heroes, terrible accents, sloppy racial stereotyping, and unmoving tragedy."  Personally I tend to agree with the more favourable assessment. I agree that the quality of the storyline is far below that which we have come to expect from literature or top notch Hollywood screenplays but this is a first person shooter video game  a medium that famously eschews any attempt at coherent storytelling The two Juarez games tell a multi-generational epic story and developers Tec...

Lows: No free to play and no new content yet for Lotro Europe. Not even a clear date as to when these will be released. In the six weeks I have been back in Middle Earth I have pretty much achieved everything I wanted to achieve before the release of the new content. I am finished the Epic books and I have equipped my level capped main character with a reasonable if not spectacular set of gear and skills. The end game grind awaits which is the point I normally get bored and move on from the game but the carrot of new content still dangles tantalisingly out there. I guess I will try and run a few more end game dungeons while I wait without making a serious effort to gear up for raiding. Highs: I did have a minor success last night when I managed to solo a difficult quest that was recommended for a small fellowship (the Book 9: Epilogue quest set in Gath Ulunn ). It is common enough to hear players talk about soloing group encounters and I am sure more experienced, better geared pla...

Currently playing through Call of Juarez:Bound in Blood in between bouts of Lotro. I really liked the first Call of Juarez game and this sequel was a complete steal on sale from Go Gamer , Eurogamer's digital download service (still on sale as of 3rd October 2010 by the way). I am enjoying Bound in Blood so far. Just like the first game it features a very strong storyline which is in fact a prequel to the original. The Wild West setting is superbly done at least to my Hollywood trained eyes and top notch graphics and sound effects provide a great immersive experience. The quick draw bullet time mode has been expanded on with different effects for different situations but it no longer feels like an I win button. Partly this is because it no longer charges up automatically meaning that it is no longer a given that you will have it available whenever you need it. Another reason is that the enemies are a lot smarter and inclined to use cover which prevents the from being easy targe...