intrigued

looks good.

but the choice of games looks poor. boring shooters, motor racing and fifa?

jeez.

neverwinter nights 2

so, i found myself daring yet another sequel.

i loved neverwinter nights. at least, pre-expansion pack. you see, i loved the outfits in the first game. i'm a big fan of playing elf chick mages or rogues. they're brilliant. for starters, they look tiny and sneaky and cute, and then they often have the better animations. plus, when you zoom up they're prettier than ugly old orcs or something.

in any case, the outfits were brilliant.

until the stupid expansion came along and turned all the wizard necromancer outfits into dresses.

i really

really

really

REALLY

hate wearing dresses.

to start with, the animations just look silly. and secondly, they're dresses and not very spooky when you fancy yourself as a demonic little necromancer running around shoving your chaotic evil wand under people's noses.

it was just embarassing, and i found myself tossing away any magically helpful "robes" in favour of something useless but tight-fitting. they just LOOKED better - what with all the pouches and things. much more fun.

so, suitably disgusted at seeing i now have a repeat performance of compulsory dresses, i haven't really gotten into neverwinter nights 2 which has probably THE most annoying camera thing known to gaming. i haven't seen one so bad in . . . well, i haven't. it's totally annoying, flipping inward and outward when you go under things and just seeming to zip about so you can't see what the hell you're doing, and in many cases anything attacking me is dead at the hands of my minions before i can pull the stupid camera around to target it. either that, or i'm the dead one.

and no, i haven't got the hang of the target next target buttons. they're crap. if i want to play games where i have to push a lot of buttons, i'd play quake. or whatever they call it now.

i also find the stupid way the spells work are really really irking me. some spells you target a creature, and others you must target yourself (area effect - such as some kind of booming fire spell i have). annoying!!!!!! it's annoying because you target your creature, and you zap him with ice, then you press your fiery spell, and nothing happens! so you press it again, then realise you're no longer targeting the creature, so you target him, and click your spell, then right click the creature and the spell effect disappears (some spells you need to right-click and others seem to need a left click - annoying!!!!), and then you realise you have to target YOURSELF, so by the time you've wrapped your head about THAT, you're either dead, or your minions have had all the fun and you're left swearing at the screen.

other minions seem to require healing, so you tell them to heal (appropriate right click), and it queues the healing process then just skips it for a while. sure, it's supposed to heal next "turn" but that doesn't stop it ignoring the healing process for the whole frikken LIFE of your minion.

or yourself...

i'm trying really hard to find something, ummm, endearing about this dumbass game, but so far i can't.

i mean, i'm not exactly a newbie. i've been playing dumbass games for well over fifteen years. the minions seem fairly ok at handling themselves, which is good, but the controls are just manic. there is just no rhyme or reason to have to do so much click clicking about. you have to keep pausing if you want to get it right. and while i didn't mind pausing all the time in neverwinter nights, in the sequel it's just a pain in the posterior because it doesn't seem to help at all. the first game the pausing was helpful and enjoyable. you set your spells and sat back and howled at the screen as you wailed your banshee and watched everything melt. brilliant.

this game... i'm not sure if i want to keep going long enough to see if the animation for wail of the banshee is as good as the original neverwinter nights...

so far it's getting me down. worst than dungeon siege 2's stupid mario brothers badguys.

what am i looking for?

well, dungeon siege 2 is over. what happened?

i got bored.

so why am i so demanding? what do i want?

i don't know. something with MEAT. see, even though i'm a vegetarian, when it comes to games, i want some meat.

i'm tired of simplicity. this game's badguys were giving me the nostalgic creeps. it was like playing mario brothers all over again. the only thing missing was the atari soundtrack. the bip bip bip that turned into bipbipbip as the bad guy suddenly clobbered faster and let loose a standard all-screen devouring spray of stuff you have to jump to avoid, but usually can't so die and have to do it again.

i nearly cried.

every single stupid time.

not that i mind smashing stuff. i love smashing stuff. grimloch loved his axe.

but...

i don't know. it's all so overly simple, and the only way designers are trying to make it more difficult is to make you control more units at once which, frankly, bores me to tears and makes me want to play something else. i don't like managing a team. i like wading in and giving it a damn good seeing to. i mean, i'm the hero, not a team of heroes.

i don't need them. i should be strong enough to do it alone. zatoichi style.

i don't want puzzles, either. puzzles shit me. pull this, drag that, oh and look - remember this stupid sequence. i hate sequence puzzles. they annoy me. follow the maze is fine, but puzzles are annoying because they're not, strictly speaking, puzzles.

and fetch the thing! argh! i'm so sick of fetch the thing. all wow was was fetch the thing! don't make me fetch the thing! oh, please, no more fetch the things.

where do they find the writers for these? can't they think of anything else?

and why get experience points for killing? take away that bullshit. give us experience points for time, or something. i mean, i want to play a sneaky rogue. i want to sneaky around, kill the badguy and slip out. but i can't! because i have to kill everthing or i can't advance in levels! that's stupid! i'm sneaky, not a warrior! why make me warrior stuff? it's STUPID!

and i'm a warrior, not a wall! i kill stuff! not stand there like a wall! i don't want a mage every time i want to kill something! i want to kill it! i want the fun of slashing its throat out with my axe! i want the joyous battlecry of a job well done while the stupid mage scurries about getting in the way beneath my feet.

and magery! i want to wade in and just wipe out entire rooms with my awesome evil spells! not flick fireball after fireball! what's wrong with one-hit kills? i LIKE one-hit kills. all this hit them 20 times til they die crap! such annoying repetitive nonsense! i'm uber! i'm not a sniffly little apprentice. sure, multi-hit kills in the beginning is fine. you expect that. but by level 20, you expect to be pretty damn lethal! but in every game you always feel you're an apprentice and can never quite master anything, even though your stats say you've maxed something out.

hell, if i've maxed it out, i MUST be able to kill ANYTHING with it, right?

all these games are doing my head in. they're just atari games. jump, swish, jump, strafe, slash, repeat until monster speeds its attack then dies. yawn.

i don't want to be hitting more buttons. i want to be immersed. i want to feel effortless. i want to see beautiful graphics and some awesome fight scenes. i want to feel every encounter is an adventure. not a matter of harvesting. i'm tired of harvesting. it's too repetitive. what's wrong with giving more variety?

ddo looked promising, but the graphics were laughable, and as such it just made it difficult to play. creature jumping on top of barrels? when they don't even have a jump animation? just looks silly and detracts from the immersive thing.

i don't know. maybe i'm getting old.

the other thing that annoys me right now is customising. i love customising. i want to look different! but i hate this trend toward constant upgrading. why? armour is armour. i want to be able to say, "right, i want green armour." and get it.

why not?

that's what i'm looking for! and i don't want to have to upgrade it every two minutes. i LIKE how i look, why should i have to wear the stupid purple armour? i don't want to look purple! i want to look green! and why can't i keep this axe? i like how it looks! this stupid axe which is the next level up looks dumb.

do away with upgrades. do away with all of that. make the character's skills more important. please.

customise. let me customise and keep how i want to look. ninja style or bunny rabbit. however.

and stories? what's wrong with stories? why can't we be involved in stories. they're not difficult. why make them so stupidly simple? why not make them a bit more complex? i don't mind spending a few days whipping around doing stuff, if only i were doing something interesting. that level from vampire just amazed me. it was so well designed. that's how games should be. and it's not hard to do that kind of thing as an instance in an mmporpg or something. it's really not.

i'm sad.

i want a game which excites me. not makes the muscles on my shooty finger get big and strong.

dungeon siege 2

well, i didn't go much further with the vampire game. it just didn't meet the same level of interest as that single level involving a haunted mansion. there was no sense of atmosphere.

so, i pulled out dungeon siege 2, and re-entered. i played the first dungeon siege with relish, and a few friends. the thing i'd liked about the first game was it was kind of click-friendly. you didn't do much clicking. it was pretty mindless. that, you'd think would be a downfall, but actually it was a great relief. you felt more like you were watching a movie, and it certainly made casting spells, switching spells in combat, and managing your healing all a pleasure which didn't distract from the eyecandy. and let's face it, the first game had a lot of eyecandy. i can't begin to count the amount of times i'd walk into a new level and feel breathless with awe at the amazing sense of reality and just atmosphere of the whole game. to me, it felt exactly how diablo 2 should have been.

i was, then, disappointed with dungeon siege 2, whose graphics seems a little less fun, and the combat system redesigned to be more clicky and more complicated in places. not much so, but noticable. so instead of spending your time swinging your camera around to get a good shot of yourself exploding heads, you spend it pressing buttons and looking at the keyboard and then clicking clicking. annoying. and more annoying because battle gets so intense you find yourself clicking your own guys, then switching to controlling them when all you were trying to do was target some other guy. totally annoying, and was the reason i gave up the game in the first place.

however, lacking anything else fantasy-based which interested me, i thought to give it another chance.

can't say i'm enjoying it a great deal. i was bored out of my skull for most of the time, and ended up doing something i very rarely do - hunted up a funky add-on thing to give me a look at the higher grade items to see if it was worth continuing on.

cheated, basically.

still can't get totally into it.

but, looking around at the state of fantasy games, i'm so disappointed. they keep trying to either be too generic or too complicated. you have no idea how much i hate having to manage a party. i don't want a party. i want to do my thing. i want to explode heads if i'm a mage, or sneak quietly and stab if i'm a rogue, or wade in and slice everything to ribbons with an axe if i'm a warrior. none of this desperate need to fill up my time on covering my team. damn team.

but seems so many games demand teams.

it was the final nail in my wow fun, as i didn't want to spend my time with teams. i didn't want to do every dungeon with a team. that's annoying. especially when the majority of players are so fixated on their specific way of playing that they forget it's a game and turn it into a rehearsed play. sorry, guys, but it's not that kind of play!

so, i'm not sure what game is next. i want something which i can sneak in. something like oblivion but mmporpg would be great. loved that game. so freeing. so much fun. especially the dark brotherhood quests. man, they rocked. i would so love a game that actually went the extra yards with their "class" systems like that game did. the whole fun of going to some sneaky underground base was just plain brilliant. the whole game was genius.

i miss that game.

hmm.

the nosferatu creepy

picked up a copy of vampire the masquerade: bloodlines while waiting for inspiration elsewhere to strike. i gave up on city of villains, thanks to some wacky support answers. basically, a friend of mine bought a copy of the game, hoping we could form a ravenous duo of death-dealing villains, but found the copy he'd purchased online was the american release, and not the european release as mine was. unconcerned, he installed, and found that, unlike any other game we'd been playing, he couldn't actually get onto my servers, and i couldn't get on his.

still relatively unconcerned, he wrote to support and was told he'd have to provide proof of purchase BEFORE they'd let him use the european servers. okay, now that was weird. but when he said he'd got it from ebay (and copy-pasted his worthless receipt), they said they wouldn't help him out because ebay wasn't a proper retailer. despite having bought it new from an online shop through ebay. sounds just plain crazy and like they were avoiding work. so, after a few more beggings and confused queries ending up in wait after wait for answers, we just gave up and i cancelled my subscription and moved on.

so, i got vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, and installed it. i'm a big old fan of the white wolf universe. i'd say it was for the tabletop rpg, but i'd be lying. it was for the ccg version, which i played with friends for many years. i also got the old vampire game they bought out years ago which was a complete flop because the company making the game released it and ran. kind of looks like the same has happened again. i'd love to see a mmporpg of the white wolf universe. i mean, how cool would that be? for matures and not teens, of course.

so, i burned up the game, downloaded a patch and dived headfirst in.

the game was kind of boring me a bit. and then i got to my first actual real kind of mission. it was to go to a haunted house and retrieve something which belongs to the ghost there. sounded boring. but i went.

and wow.

i have to tell you, as i walked through the map of the house, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up! i have never in my life of gaming had a reaction such as this to a game. i was totally caught in it. little whispers, ghosts peeking through stuff. in one room, you walk into the room and you can see this malicious guy standing behind some pipes. as you go around the pipes, he's disappeared! it just keeps happening. whispers. lightbulbs burst and explode. in one room pots and pans are thrown wildly about in increasing violence. it's just so creepy. it's like walking through a japanese horror movie.

i'm happy. did a few other little quests, but so far none has captured that atmosphere. i'm going to keep going in hope some do...

wow.

city of models

as you can see, the developers worked REAL hard on the models...

city of villains

as you can see, i'm playing city of villains... :P more on THAT soon - i'm stilly newbying it.

new stuff

i've been promising an archive of my work for ages.

so, i finally got around to figuring out the google groups system and have found it a fantastic way to archive my work. yay! so check out the link...

also, i've started playing some everquest 2, as a relief from the cartoony aspects of wow. also looking for a real rogue to play. something i can sink my daggers into...

missing in action

hi there!!!

i'm not lost. in fact, i've made it to level 49. it's just that i've been a bit tied up during january. so much has happened.

as you can see, i was in the middle of an epic battle, facing the rampaging horde of evil that just begged to have their intestines all torn out and chopped to bits with my axe. and, being the gentleorc i am, i obliged.

i've also begun a little sneaky rogue, and she's made her way to level 12. fairly decent and disreputable, i assure you.

but, no doubt, you'll be hearing of it all soon...