Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

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.