Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Santa brought me a lovely new Andoid phone - a Samsung Galaxy S and I am learning to love  and hate the world of mobile phone apps. An app is nothing more than a software application for a phone but Apple has managed to turn a simple concept into a phenomenon their Iphone App store and Google is doing its best to imitate this with the Android Market. The rise of the app store has meant an explosion of free and low priced software for smart phones. As long as your exercise a little common sense with regard to security and privacy this is a good thing but there is one particular type of app that really annoys me: The apps that are designed to replace internet browsers. I am talking about facebook apps, Youtube apps, Google and Gmail apps and so on. There are apps for just about every major web service and now even minor players are jumping on the app bandwagon. My local library has an app, so does my local traffic authority (for telling you about speed cameras). Why oh why do ...

I haven't disappeared but what with Christmas and family activities it has been pretty quiet on the gaming front. Minecraft proved a big hit with my daughters. I even set up a home server to allow them play together in multi-player. I made this harder fro myself than it should have been by starting out on patch day so I had to fight with version incompatibility as well as new patch bugs. Once I got everything sorted out however it worked a treat. As an unexpected bonus I managed to set things up so you can log in single player or multiplayer and still edit the same world. The trick to doing this is to store the multiplayer server in the Saves directory of the single player game and to change the level-name in the "server.properties" file. to be the name of your single player world.  This sounds bizarre but it does work. It means that when I am not around to set up a server the girls can still log in with single player and work on their world. The only game I have been p...

Minecraft's world building has proven such a hit with my kids that I bought a second license with the intention of setting up our own private server for a bit of multi-player world building. Both my licenses are alpha licenses which cost €10 each. Sometime today the beta starts and the price goes up to €15. If you have any interest in Minecraft but  haven't gotten around to buying it yet I strongly recommend buying before the price goes up. It isn't just a matter of the extra €5. Alpha purchasers also get "all future versions of the game for free" while beta purchases will only up to the first release free. Given the success of the game this makes the alpha purchase an incredible bargain for the few hours that remain at that price.

I'm not really into building / crafting games so I had given Minecraft a miss until yesterday when I realised that the price goes up by €5 with the release of the Beta version on the 20th December. A game that sells over 800,000 (and rising ) copies at a tenner a piece despite being laughably ugly and still in alpha must have something going for it, mustn't it? I reckoned it was worth a punt for a tenner and anyway it might be something to amuse the kids who are a bit more craft minded than I am. I logged in and paid my money before launching the browse version of the game.  I sat down with my daughter to play it for a bit. Gosh it is ugly isn't it? Single player "peaceful" mode seemed like a good place to start getting familiar with the game and thanks to paulsoaresjr's helpful video's we were soon chopping down trees and crafting basic items like torches and picks. My daughter was intrigued by the crafting interface so we started experimenting to see ...

I have been playing Empire Total War for about 2 weeks now at a very intermittent pace. I an still working through the "Road to Independence" tutorial campaign but now that I have finally reached Chapter 3 most of the restrictions seen to be removed and it feels like a full game. Chapter 3 opened with my American rebel forces being overrun by the British redcoats at Bunker Hill which was a bit disheartening until I read that this is historically accurate. I am enjoying Empire more than I expected having read reports of bugs and poor AI. I was initially concerned that the advent of powerful firearms would remove a lot of variety from the game because one soldier with a musket is much the same as any other. Having played a bit however I haven't had problems with bugs or AI and I find the changes to combat intriguing. There is something very satisfying about stopping an enemy charge dead in its tracks with a hail of crossfire from overlapping volleys. Increased accuracy...

Much excitement about the confirmation that a new Elder Scrolls game has been confirmed for next November and that it is a direct sequel to Oblivion . Oblivion didn't impress me quite as much as it's iconic predecessor "Morrowind" but nevertheless it was  hugely impressive game and I have learned to eagerly anticipate any new release from Bethseda Softworks. The news even inspired me to re-install Oblivion and I am currently playing a very impressive full conversion mod called  "Nehrim: At Fates Edge" . Not many mods offer 50+ hours of hand crafted single player campaign so this is quite special and I will probably discuss it at more length later. The real justification for this post however was the following page from the Elder Scrolls Wiki that I stumbled upon while googling for the mod. It reminded me that Oblivion, one of the most successful single player games of the last decade widely recognised as a monumental achievement in gaming, was fundamenta...

Thanks to a heavy snowfall I had the perfect excuse to spend the weekend indoors playing Metro 2033 bought in last weeks Steam Sale. It is a very Russian game. The post apocalyptic setting and the art style remind me a lot of Stalker but the gameplay is more linear. Indeed it owes a lot to half life. I actually enjoyed the game very much. Sometimes a good old fashioned on rails shooter is exactly what you need. The game does have a few tricks up its sleeve most notably the use of ammunition as currency leaving you with a constant dilemma about whether to shoot your bullets or spend them. Restricting the availability of ammunition is a tried and trusted way of increasing the tension in a horror game and for the most part this achieves the same effect but there are a few places where I found it annoying. In the early part of the game there are shops offering cool weapons and upgrades but I never knew whether I could afford to spend the ammo on them or not and by the time I got a handle...

I bought Empire Total War in Steam's sale. I love Total War games but one ritual every time I get a new one is to try out the tutorial. To date they have all been uniformly awful. Would Empire manage to buck the trend? The good news is that Empire appears to have addressed the most serious issue from previous Total War tutorials. Previous games had badly corralled tutorial campaigns that allowed noobies to break the tutorial by wandering off script. Given that the scripts were often non-intuitive getting to the end of the tutorial without breaking it was actually harder than just jumping in and playing the game. Empire avoids this nicely by straight jacketing the player and only allowing a very limited range of actions during the "Road to Independence" tutorial campaign. Unfortunately no-one seems to have told the in game adviser. After winning my first battle and capturing an Indian settlement the advisor helpfully suggested that I construct some buildings. Good adv...

Perhaps the most controversial items in the F2P Lotro Cash are the stat tomes which give permanent increases to of a characters base stats. For example  approximately €5 buys you a tome of Vitality which permanently increases your vitality by 10. You can purchase up to 5 ranks of each stat tome for a total of +50 to each stat (in Europe the limit is currently +30 soon to be lifted).  To put these numbers in perspective: 50 points of might would increase my Champions melee damage by about 3% and a piece of end game armour  typically gives a total increase of between 100 and 150 points spread across several stats. 50 points in any stat is not a game breaker but it does make a difference. In theory the stat tomes drop in the game but the drop rate is extremely low and nobody seriously believes that farming them is realistic.  If you want the benefit of those extra stats you have to pony up the cash. Since so much of an mmorpg players time is spent trying to earn i...

The hard drive of a modern computer holds tens of thousands of files stored in a labyrinthine tangle of folders and sub folders. It used to be comforting therefore to know that there was always one folder called "My Documents" that belonged to you and in which you could store your personal stuff in a special place where it would always be easy to find. Sadly this is no longer the case if you are a gamer. For the last few years games have taken to using and abusing "My Documents" as if it were there own personal playground. My own computer was a clean install only a few months back and already "My Documents" looks more like the catalogue of a game shop than a collection of personal files: It started out with good intentions. A decade ago games stored all of the players personal information (save games, config files, screenshots) in sub-folders of the program directory. This was not ideal because the information was very hard to find should you ever w...

My shooter of choice at present is indie fly em up Dogfighter. It is available for cheap on Steam and it is a total blast. Imagine the shooty madness of Quake combined with an arcade biplane fighter game. The funny thing is I suck at shooters and I suck at flying games but I love this.  I am using mouse and keyboard to control the plane and I find I can fairly fling it around the sky. I am sure I could probably pull tighter turns with a joystick but the increased precision of the mouse compensates. It took me a couple of hours to get the hang of the controls before it clicked. Favourite Aircraft:  Swift Strike Fighter. It is all about speed. Favourite Weapon: Hard to say I love them all but probably the shotgun just for the improbability of using one in an aircraft. Absolutely lethal when used correctly.

I love the new zone of Endewaith. Even though it is pretty much optional from a levelling point of view it is the prettiest region of the game since the Shire. There are even some hobbits hidden in there if you look hard. The scale-able dungeons are also a big hit with plenty of groups being organised for once neglected zones of the Great Barrow, Helogorod, Annuminas and the Eregion 3 man instances. My thoughts on the cash shop are generally positive so far. Some folks have compained the "Go to Store and Buy Stuff" buttons that crop up all over th game now but hey, shopping is fun so I don't really mind. I got a generous allocation of free points as a lifer and I am some way from spending it all yet. I did buy a permanent discount on horse travel, some scrolls to speed up deed grinding and  horse riding skill for a low level alt. I have previously expressed concerns that having cash shop items which allow you to bypass grind creates a moral hazard for the developer...

I thought one of the cardinal rules of internet security is that legitimate companies never ever send out emails to their customers asking them for their passwords. Knowing this rule makes it easy to resist the daily flood of scam emails purportedly from financial institutions, gaming companies and other online services informing me that my account has been compromised and that I really really really need to "click this link" and enter my password to get it all sorted out. So when I got not one but two separate emails purporting to come from Runes of Magic asking me to "click this link" and enter my password and warning of dire consequences if I didn't, my first reaction was "Scam, bin it". It reads like a scam. It even has one of those uniquely identifiable html links that scammers are so fond of for tagging their victims. It looks a bit more professionally done than the usual scam email but html is cheap and all of those logos are easily grabbed...

After all the patching I finally got to play the new European version of free to play Lotro for about an hour last night. Too early to say too much about it except that first impressions are all positive. I started the Volume 3 epic quest chain in the hope that it would soon bring me to the new region  but I was soon distracted from my mission when Volume 3 book 2 offered me this lovely item as one of the reward choices. Since the release of this chapter in the US almost two months ago there has been feverish speculation on the forums as to what it actually does. Now we Europeans have gotten in on the guessing game .  Guesses include that the horse shoe might improve critical hit chance in combat, might improve a players chance in fellowship loot rolls,  might improve drop rate of rare items, might improve the outcome of legendary weapon deconstruction plus a whole host of other suggestions both intriguing and ridiculous. Turbine has remained tight lipped except for ...

I have been playing Batman Arkham Asylum for the last week and overall I am hugely impressed. Its a very good PC port of a very good game. The ambience and the voice acting are on a par with the best that Hollywood has to offer. Mark Hamill's Joker in particular is Oscar worthy in my opinion. Unfortunately I have hit a problem. I am at the final boss fight and I am struggling to pull together the motivation to try and overcome it. I know exactly why too.  Arkham Asylum is at heart a third person action game. Part of that tradition is a complicated combat system involving  fancy moves and combo's. I have managed to get through the entire game up the final boss fight without intentionally using a single combo.  Partly this is because the mouse and keyboard control scheme although generally very well done is not as combo friendly as a gampad. Partly it is because  I have never really gotten into combo fighting games. Mainly however it is because I never really need...

Clients crashing, servers offline .... Yup it's patch day for European Lotro. I guess the forums would be going banana's too except they are also unobtainable. By the way if anyone is getting a hash sum error updating the client there is a fix: you need to replace the 3 files (.js) in codemasters/browser/greprefs with the ones from the beta or the preview client. Apparently a post on the forums explains this but of course the forums are unobtainable.

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...

It now appears that the rumour about European Lotro getting a never ending extension was no more than a rumour. Welcome back week ended last night. Now there are several threads on the forum asking " But wasn't welcome back week supposed to last...?" No official word on the issue from Codemasters or its CMs but that doesn't excuse me for having jumped on an unfounded rumour and spreading it further.  I am just going to hide under a rock for a bit and pretend it never happened. Ok?

There is an old saying:" If you want a job done ask a busy man ". I have just realised that the same principle applies, at least in my case, to mmo playing. My real life work is very seasonal and after a quiet Summer I am now up to my neck in work with long irregular days. Despite this I am spending lots of time in with Lotro. After a long hard day I find a couple of hours in Middle Earth is the perfect de-stressing tool. My playing hours can be irregular, sometimes early morning, sometimes late at night. This mitigates against organised group play but nevertheless I have made great progress on my epic books with the line help of kinmates. Only the last bit of chapter 9 to do and I am up to date. I even managed to join a few radiance gear instance runs. I enjoyed these but I remain convinced that radiance gear gated raids are a step too far for me. Doing dungeon runs with experienced players has given me an opportunity to think again about the differences between group pl...

BIG EDIT: Despite my post below it now seems that  welcome back week has indeed ended. Now I am red faced. It seems I may be guilty of spreading misinformation. You may have heard hat the European launch of Free to Play (f2p)  Lotro was delayed days before the promised launch date of 10th September and we are still waiting for a confirmed date. Commentators have pointed out the missed opportunity here and have pointed out that many Europeans who would like to try Lotro may go to the current free US servers instead. Well I just discovered that you can actually play Lotro for free with Codemasters in Europe already. This post explains it all but the gist is that returning ex subscribers can avail of a free "welcome back" deal which allows them to play for free until f2p launches while totally new players can use the free trial and they too will be able to keep playing for free until f2p launches. The welcome back package also includes accelerated XP and free horse trave...

The rules of the club of manhood are for the most part unwritten but there are one or two that deserve to be explicitly recorded and a new one has just come to my attention: If you just happen to be a handsome young man who just happens to be getting married to a beautiful young lady and if you also just happen to be a talented musician then DO NOT give in to the temptation to write your beloved a haunting ballad expressing your undying love. DO NOT play said ballad at your wedding. DO NOT record it on you tube. DO NOT distribute mp3's to all of your friends and acquaintances. THINK before you do any of the above things of your fellow man. THINK of the vast bulk of us who's musical ambition stretches no further than to learn to play the radio.  THINK of the way our wives, girlfriends significant others will latch on to this song and play it over an over with far away looks in their eyes. Think man, FOR GOD SAKE THINK of the scornful glances they will then cast at us, their ...

Volume II book 7 was entirely solo as were the first few chapters of book 8 so it was quite a surprise when book 8 chapter 3 A Relic in Lumul-Nar turned out to be a very challenging 3 man instance. My Champion Throg was lucky enough to get the help of another champion and a minstrel from our kin but we were quite unprepared for the difficulty level of the instance, which I later discovered is called "The Hall of Mirrors". After many wipes and much consultation we did eventually overcome the first boss which required positional tanking and carefully timed corruption removal but it was getting very late so we didn't manage to complete the instance. You can read a fairly good walkthrough of the instance here . The key to the first boss is keeping two buffing matron wargs apart and preventing them from healing by removing a 10s corruption (buff).  For reference we had our minstrel kite one matron while two champions beat on the other and that eventually worked. These kind ...

I love finishing things. In single player games there is generally a final boss to be overcome and no matter how cheesy the closing cut-scene I find I can walk away with a warm glow knowing that I have completed the game. Mmorpgs are unfinished by design. There is no end of game. Nevertheless a certain completionist satisfaction can still be had from finished various subgoals of which there are many. Complete a certain quest arc, complete a certain reputation grind, complete a certain armour set, complete a certain deed or collection. Completing things was pretty much the theme of my weekend in Lotro. On Friday night I had the help of a kinship group to complete the quests in Volume II book 6 . In this book the hard pressed dwarven expeditionary forcein Moria were forced to ask for Eleven help to suppress the evil that has taken over the once great dwarven stronghold. With considerable effort on Throg's part the elves of Lothlorien agreed to help not because of any love of dwar...

When writers go looking for suitable fantasy sounding names for their characters one of the most reliable sources is to borrow phrases from the Celtic languages: Welsh, Breton, Irish and Scot's Gaelic. Although I speak English as my main language I did learn Gaelic in school so I am always interested to look out for Celtic influences in my fantasy games and novels. This evening playing Lord of the rings I came across a character in volume 3 book who has been thrown out of her tribe and is called Gun Ain which she explains means "without a name". I immediately recognised the Gaelic phrase "gan ainm" gan being without and ainm meaning name.

Wikipedia defines grind as "the process of engaging in repetitive and/or non-entertaining gameplay in order to gain access to other features within the game" . I don't really do grind. When Painkiller asked me to repeat all of the levels on a harder difficulty setting just to unlock a bonus ending I declined. As far as I am concerned I have finished the game. I don't really do grind. Its not that grinding is always a bad thing. Think of knitting, think of fishing. Many hobbies of older times worked on similar principles. There is something relaxing about doing the same familiar task over and over in the knowledge that the repetition will eventually add up to a longed for reward. Indeed it could that in today's "I want it now" world grinding in games is a welcome return to delayed gratification and may even be good for the soul. Nevertheless I don't fish and I don't knit and in gaming I don't do grind. That puts me at something of a disad...

Sauron's fortress of Dol Guldur dominates the skyline of Eastern Mirkwood. It is from here that the evil one sends his forces to attack the Elves of Lothlorien. Now the tree dwellers are fighting back and the army of the Malledhrim is massing in Thangulhad to assault Sauron's vile stronghold. The dwarven champion Throg is pleased to note that for once the Elves have set aside their usual tactics of trying to defeat orcs by singing to trees and picking berries in favour of more traditional means of assault using iron and fire and large rocks.  He is particularly gratified to see that they have called on the support of dwarven siege engineers who are no doubt responsible for the impressive looking catapults you see in the picture.  Dol Guldur is currently the "End Game" of Lotro. Home to the hardest bosses living in the toughest instances with the most onerous entry requirements. When I first caught sight of the place I was impressed both by the massive forbidding fo...

At level 63 Throg is about a third of the way through the soloable content of Mirkwood, nicely on track for the upcoming expansion to be released with free to play in 12 days time. Although it is over a year old now Mirkwood is new to me and it is interesting to see how many of the subtle changes that previous expansions played around with have come together in Mirkwood as a unified whole. A players progress through through the Forest is driven by quests in a linear progression from hub to hub. As you finish the quest chains in one place you are directed to the next hub. Itemised quest rewards have been replaced entirely by collectable tokens. Tokens in various quantities can be exchanged for gear and consumables. In considerable contrast to the radiant elven forest of Lothlorien , Mirkwood is a dark and dangerous place populated by Orcs and savage beasts. All of the quests I have come across so far have been solo-able but soloing still presents a challenge. Much of the action take...

... and they are to say the least mixed . Top marks from Gameinformer and a miserable 4/10 from the usually reliable Eurogamer except that there is also a 10/10 from Eurogamer.fr . As I said, mixed. Most worrying is the fact that even reviewers who seem to understand that Mafia is not GTA have still scored the game badly . Given my impossibly high expectations I am genuinely worried now. The one glimmer of hope comes from Bill Harris at Dubious Quality . Bill is not a professional reviewer but he is someone who's opinion I trust, particularly on games that don't appeal to everyone like Mount and Blade and Red Faction Guerilla. Bill has only played the game for a few hours though. I have decided to hold off purchasing. Partly because I am as a rule frugal about buying games and I don't want to waste the price of a new release on a turkey but also because I don't want my dreams of a superb Mafia sequel to be shattered.  At very least I will wait for Bill Harris to ...

About once a week I get a large email from a large concert ticket selling agency detailing their latest offers. I have grown almost immune to to the flood of Viagra emails that have thankfully reduced to a trickle now that spam filtering has matured but this particular email really bugs me. The thing is I know this is a legitimate company because they are a well known a subsidiary of the largest ticket distributor in this part of the world. What annoys me to the point of frustration is that I am utterly unable to un-subscribe from their mailing list. Each new missive starts with the line "This is not unsolicited email - you have previously opted in to receive XXXXXX mailings" I am pretty sure this is not true. I have never bought anything from this company and I have no interest in their particular line of business. I may have bought stuff from their parent company but I am pretty fastidious at finding and ticking the box that says "don't send me spam" and...

I am back playing my dwarf Champion Throg with the general intention of soloing him up to the level cap in time for the expansion that comes with Free to Play on 10th September. After all this soloing It will be nice to be part of the buzz that comes from everyone doing new content for the first time together. Throg had languished just outside Lothlorien since last October but thankfully he was very close to the rep level needed to proceed into the Elven forest itself. This unavoidable grind with only a limited number of rep quests to repeat  was one of the contributory factors to my quitting the game for almost a year.  Imagine my delight on getting in to discover that yet another rep grind is required to get into the city itself. Happily there are more than enough interesting quests in the forest to allow you to build up the required level of rep without repeating anything. Indeed Lothlorien Forest offers the choice between combat against an orc incursion in the North West...

Today's hullabaloo is all about the ethics of buying used games. Cory Ledesma from THQ started it by declaring  in a CVG Interview that "when the game's bought used we get cheated". Tycho from Penny Arcade rowed in in support here and here . Hundred of commenters have come out on either side of this debate and in the blogosphere Syncaine has declared his agreement while Syp and others have come out strongly against. I firmly believe that I should obtain a legitimate license for every piece of software I use but I don't feel particularly philanthropic towards game developers and I will try and get that license legally the lowest cost to myself. If a developer allows their game to be legally traded second hand, or if they allow it to be deeply discounted on Steam or if they choose to offer it in a "pay what you like" sale then I will happily take that license for the lowest cost possible and feel good about it. I will admit that my conscience genui...