Onefinemess

Posted By onefinemess on August 30, 2011

No, not this one:

Or this one:

Or even Wolverine Origins #14 or Wolverine: Weapon X V1 #14 OR Wolverine: Weapon X V2 #14!  None of those.  I’m talking about the most recent one (V3 I think… maybe V4 depending on how you count), this bad boy:

OK, now that that is clear.  On to the drama.  Just when you think a comic book character’s life absolutely could not get any more fucked up well – you were wrong!  OF COURSE.  Not that that was me, nope.  I was like, “totally, his life is always going to get worse.”

<.<

Anyway.  So.  SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILERS BLAAAALERS.  You have been warned.

Where was I?  Oh, right, at “so.”  SO, in this latest volume of the adventures of our favorite Canadian with claws (as opposed to Sasquatch, Wild Child (Is he Canadian?), or maybe Puck with some mean press-ons) – well, for the first half (issue 1-6 or 1-7ish), Wolverine gets sent to Hell (with caps, although where it falls in the Marvel pantheon of underverses wasn’t quite clear to me, or maybe it was and I’ve forgotten) and some demon takes over his body and tries to do horrible things to people he cares about.  Typical, right?  Pretty much.  Of course he escapes eventually (right before the X-Men are about to put him down!  Because Cyclops has a Backup Plan – not at all like the Xavier Protocols from a decade or two ago that caused so much drama) but – dun dun – that was the plan all along!  Send him to Hell (just because), then let him escape, then the real revenge starts!

Because the second arc is the “dun dun” part.   In which we learn that the crazy villains plot against him are just a bunch of normal people (well, as normal as you can be in the Marvel Universe) with a pretty understandable axe to grind: Wolverine killed someone dear to them.  Maybe it was intentional, maybe it was accidental, maybe they didn’t understand that the person he killed deserved it, or maybe they didn’t (lot’s of periods where Wolverine is brain washed…) – the point is just that they have all had their lives horribly impacted by Wolverine doing what he does best (aside from multi-tasking).

So, that’s… mildly interesting, right?  It’s been done before, I’m certain, I just can’t remember the specifics.  So, all this happens and Wolverine fights through a bunch of random hired goons to get to the “evil masterminds” only to discover that they have all committed suicide to deny him the revenge he craves (or so they think).  He doesn’t seem to mind so much that they did so, he’s just happy they are dead.  He wants them dead so badly, of course, because of the terrible things the demon running around with his skin on did in his absence, ostensibly at their beck (but not call, demon’s don’t do phones).   Which was part of their plan!  Enrage him!  Then deny him his revenge!

Oh, but there’s one other thing… they also let him know (via a movie playing when he finds their bodies) that all the cannon fodderfolks  he had to fight through to get to them were…. wait for it…

His children!

DUN DUN.

[Note: This is actually a pretty decent explanation as to why we've only ever seen one Wolverine-spawn - this little group has been snapping them all up, at least for the last 40 years or so.]

[Note2: What makes zero sense is how none of them had a healing factor or claws of any sort.]

Yeah, so that’s why he looks so sad on the cover.  I mean, that would seriously fuck someone up, right?  Especially someone who won’t let people kill Daken – who so obviously needs to be put down, right?  So one would expect him to be even more protective of a bunch of regular human kids.

My question is: Will any of this actually matter?  Will this change the way Wolverine goes about his business?

My guess: Of course not, silly!

The coming solicits make it sound like it will but, realistically… they ain’t kidding no one.   X-Force is solicited as continuing… as are his other 2 or 3 titles, which I’m sure will have pleennnnty of killing.  What’s he gonna do, research the people he kills before and after?   That seems like the easiest solution (and maybe the intended lesson here:  “Your killings have consequences – even fodder kills!”)… send some money (I’m sure he’s got a ton) & condolences to the families at least… maybe try and keep track of all the women you sleep with (since he prrrrrobably won’t stay fixed) to try and keep the kid thing from happening again.  Or kill yourself.

This has been brought to you by the entity that monitors the random comic things that eat up my brain space.

 

 

 

Category: Comics | No Comments »
Tags: Wolverine

Posted By onefinemess on August 28, 2011

OK, I started this on a train, but it turns out that even a train moves too much for me to look at a screen for very long.  I’m breaking out in a hot sweat as we speak, headache is blowing up and I’m annoyed.  Will finish this tonight, I guess.

<—>

Alright.  Home, wife and boys thoroughly hugged (all) and put to bed (the boys).

I took a few pictures on my phone that I will intersperse so I have something to intersperse.  I so rarely post pictures, might as well fill up a post.

First: The trip:

I rode the train up from Portland with a friend.  We stayed at the Moore Hotel, in downtown (?) Seattle:

It was not one of the “official” PAX hotels listed on the website – which was probably why it was affordable.  All the employees we encountered were friendly and helpful and it was an all around solid place.  I’d recommend it to anyone

The trip was relatively uneventful.  We departed, then talked about very geeky things, as geeks are wont to do, then arrived.

Saturday & Sunday morning we had breakfast at Seattle Coffee Works:

Where I had the best 2 mochas of my life.   Now, I’m not a coffee connoisseur or anything – the truth is that I generally hate “coffee taste” – so I go with mochas when I need a coffee fix.  So, I’ve tried more than a few over the years.  Anyway, this happened:

We also ate at a decent Mexican place (a little pricey and not particularly to my taste, but it looked really popular – we didn’t have a reservation so wound up eating at the bar), a good Vietnamese place (good food, nice interior – seemed like a good place for a date), and a good burger place (the fries were killer but the burger had onion cooked into it.  If you like that kind of thing, you will probably really like the burgers).

We also got drinks one night at the Nitelite:

It was right next door to our hotel and recommended by a guide book my friend had, so we figured what the hell.  The drinks were DIRT cheap ($3 for a 7&7 & 2.75 for a rum & coke) and the place was apparently a local dive.  The music was a bit loud, but it seemed like a good place to go if you aren’t into the club scene and/or just wanted to sit with some friends and have multiple drinks without emptying your wallet.

On to the games!

There was no Diablo 3 (due to there being no Blizzard).  WHAT THE GAMER FUCK?  Seriously . Ugh.  I bought my ticket so long ago – before any of the attendees were announced (I think they probably sold out before many/all of the announcements went up), so I couldn’t exactly plan for this but… I kind of expected Diablo 3 to be there. I mean, I think it was at the last PAX I went to (3 years ago?) So… you know.  Oh well, lame.

So that was at least 30% of the games I wanted to check out… the others were Guild Wars 2 and Secret World.

I got in a little bit of play time with GW2 – only about 70% of a session because damn room closed halfway into our play sessions.  I went with the Sylvari – because I saw this, which was awesome – and because I wanted to check out a character with some abilities.  Here are a couple super high quality phone camera pics:

I was pretty happy with the way the game played.  I went with a ranger, and she started with a bow and a sword + torch combo as alternates.  You could also equip an axe primary or a dagger or warhorn secondary (or any combination).  Bow was fast animating ranged attacks, axe was slower animating (and, I assume, higher damage – but I didn’t check) ranged damage, sword was standard melee except I had some crazy attack where I spun around in a circle around the enemy, warhorn let me use a buff of some time (I forgot), dagger had a throw option and a poison option and the torch could be thrown to ignite an enemy or you could make a bonfire at your feet for a pbaoe fire attack.

Lots of options.  I didn’t see any pet specific skills on demo, but I understand there are some.

I was a little underwhelmed with the axe, but I suspect that was probably because of how much faster the bow felt – although I think I was killing things at the same rate, the bow just felt more zoom-zoomy.

I watched a number of folks play through the Norn & Char newbie areas as well, and everything looked great.

The other “new” game that I wanted to check out was Secret World, which, unfortunately was not playable.  However, we did get into the little “secret room” deal where they showed the audience some of the first dungeon and several game features.  The fact that you’ll be able to have all 500+ skills on a single character (and thus no reason for alts), is going to make for a really interesting experience.

I was a little bummed when the presenter described gameplay in terms of the trinity (tank/dps/heal), BUT the positive thing I took from it is that anyone can configure themselves any which way.  I’m hoping this will allow for some relatively “new” options – stuff like a ranged character with defensive skills & taunt, or maybe a melee tank type with controls, etc.

We went to a couple panels – the big Guild Wars 2 one and a much, much smaller City of Heroes Freedom panel.  The GW2 panel was good and answered lots of questions (no kill stealing – everyone gets credit or no credit, no level capped characters griefing lowbie events – they get auto-sidekicked down), as well as gave out some new tiny bits (multiple guilds per character, a sidekicking system – I was pleased to hear them use the word “sidekicking” – lots o other games & companies try and come up with a different word for it… to try and avoid giving credit where credit is due maybe? :P).   The was a funny bit where they told the audience they had taped prizes to the bottom of some of their chairs… and many people proceeded to rip off the warning/instruction labels taped to the bottom of the chairs… totally not me <.<.   On the whole, solid panel, but nothing spectacular.

The second panel was the City of Heroes panel on the new issue (21), Freedom.  They mostly just went over stuff I already knew (because I’m a CoH forumite…not much gets by us – even the backpack announcement, which sounded like they expected it to be surprising, was old news), but it was pretty cool to hear the devs talk about it, and hear their answers to audience questions.

There were a couple new things, like the viking/berserker costume pieces I’ve got a shot of above there.  They also revealed the rewards for the signature story arcs:

Still not enough Astrals or Incarnate Threads to matter, unfortunately.  For a once a week award (which I’m guessing takes longer, time-wise, to acquire than 2-5 BAFs)… 1 astral or 10 threads is incredibly paltry and almost insulting.  I hope they crank that up. a bit.

There was also a guy dressed up like Lord Recluse:

What else?

There were lots of great cosplayers!  I mean… there were lots of terrible ones too, but plenty that people obviously put a lot of time and effort into.  Google around a bit after folks have had time to post their pictures.  I saw this costume Sunday and it stood out as one of the best (to me).  I had a feeling she would show up pretty quickly in the cosplay galleries (the one below is from “comicbookmovie.com” and kotaku has one of her as well):

I didn’t recognize the character, and asked her what it was… a video game done in anime style is all I got (the name was something Japanese that I didn’t retain) – if anyone happens to know the specifics, please let me know, I’m curious how close she got to what she was aiming for.  The white & vivid red, the red contacts and butterflies, it just worked.

There were tons of others (lots of decent LoL ones that I’m sure will turn up on the forums there, lots of Mortal Kombat – I saw very little to no super heroes or Street Fighter costumes), and I’m sure many that I didn’t see.  I know that when I went with Jen & Z the last time we saw a great Fruitfucker costume and an (I think) functional, human-sized Gameboy.  I saw a couple human-sized Gameboys this time, but none functional.

Another solid costume that I remember having to stop and turn and check out because it was so well put together:

Of course, it also looked hot as hell to walk around in (there were several costumes of that sort).  There were a ton of good Star Wars costumes but, frankly, the volume of those renders them less impressive these days.

Other odds and ends:

.

.

.

And, of course, the place with the best cell data reception in the house:

What?  It was the only place I could get twitter to work!

 

 

Category: gaming | No Comments »
Tags: City of Heroes, Guild Wars 2, PAX, PAX Prime 2011, Seattle Coffee Works, The Secret World

Posted By onefinemess on August 20, 2011

by: Steven Erikson

I finally finished the series!  Questions are answered!  Closure is provided!

OK, so… those things are technically “true”, but also mostly false.  SOME questions are answered, most aren’t. SOME closure is provided (random stuff like Whiskeyjack & Korlat).

I’m on the fence.  I mean, everything that happened was pretty badass and glorious and what not.  And I know Erikson is writing at least 6 more Malazan books (Tiste Andii prequel trilogy, Karsa trilogy) plus the 2 or 3 that Esslemont has left to go… but still.  I think, I mean the mystery that is Tavore should have at least been unwrapped a little better.  I mean, we get a couple little clues… she tells Gesler or Stormy in this book or Dust (I forget) that when House Paran lost its only son (Ganoes) – that event set her on this path.  But that makes not the slightest god damn of sense.  So I’m annoyed about that.

Gruntle’s end also didn’t really make any sense at all.  I mean.  Yeah.

Sinn’s made sense, I guess.  Grubb… well, he didn’t really use his power again after the bit with Icarnium.  Oh… ugh and Icarnium… the cycle just continues, REALLY?  And we still don’t know why even the gods are afraid of him.  Something about him being a walking gate into Chaos or something?  Man, out of all the running threads I really wanted Mappo & Icarnium to have some kind of resolution.

And Draconus & Errastus?  Knuckles & Oponn? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing to be resolved in a Karsa trilogy, but I suppose it will have to be.

Don’t get me wrong, the book was great… but it still felt really unfinished.  I don’t know if that’s because Erikson was thinking he could fit Karsa’s arc into this book as well and left a lot of things to that or what.

The bit with Cotillion and the Crippled God was not explained to my satisfaction either.  I mean, we know what happened, but if he just needed to die, couldn’t anyone have killed him?

OH. AND.  Ugh.  I don’t get how this helps Shadowthrone and Cotillion.  Like, one of the longest running plot threads ever.  Getting rid of the Crippled God does what?  I mean, I can see how they might have wanted the elders dead (mostly Errastus?), but I’m… agahahhahahah SO MUCH TO PROCESS.

So.  Yeah.  That happened.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so many questions at the end of a series before.

FOUR AND A HALF STARS

Because it was awesome, and awesome exploded all over awesome, and way less people died than I would expect.  And Nefarius Bred showed up, kind of.

Bonus half star or so for being the capstone is a well, I don’t think I’m over stating in the least when I say fucking epic bit of fantasy.

I  seriously doubt anything will approach the scope of this for a long time.  Even Wheel of Time, which may wind up with a higher page count, is not on the same level when it comes to the sheer scope of what is going on.  I think, in the end, I like WoT a little better, but this series will definitely have a special place in the fantasy canon.

Afterthought: Did Silchas lie to the dragons?

 

Note: My book “reviews” really aren’t reviews so much as oddly angled commentaries, eh?

Category: Book Review, Books | No Comments »
Tags: Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson

Posted By onefinemess on August 18, 2011

I installed this one a month or so ago on a whim.  Well, kind of a whim. I mean, there was some intention to it: I was thinking about writing a series of posts about pet classes in various MMOs and realized I hadn’t played Conan yet.  Still, it was kinda whim-ish. I mean, I had no particular urge to play this game otherwise.

ANYWAY.  Couple things:

• This game has the longest launcher/start up of ANY MMo I have tried.  Heck, it takes longer to launch than most stand-alone games.  Longer than any game I can think of at the moment anyway.  True, it’s not too bad on my 6 core desktop, but it’s pretty damn long on my laptop.
• AoC has a distinct visual style.  This is a good thing.  You may not like it (I don’t particularly, it’s too washed out and bleak for me so far), but at least it exists.  This is in contrast to something like Rift that I don’t really feel has any particular visual appeal to it beyond being “up to date” and competently done.
• Free to play!  For the most part… I had to pay to unlock the class I wanted to try (Necromancer).  But, it’s a one time $8 or $10 or whatever.  So I’ll be able to pop back in until the game dies and continue dragging my zombies around.
• Fatalities.  Or critical hit kills or something.  Some skills are actually based off these.   Enemy plays a different death animation, generally gorier.
• Oh.  Almost forgot: adult themed.  So, in addition to the fatalities you’ll find : bare breasts.  (That seems to be the extent of it as far as I’ve seen).

On my first try at a character, I made it to level 10 as a Demonologist.  Note: this is NOT a pet class.  I was horribly disappointed to find, upon reaching level 10 or so, that the pets are just a buffs with shitty attacks.  Generally shitty buffs too, at least the first one.  I think having your pet out gave you ~60 mana.  I’d never ran out of mana at that point, so I could care less.  The pets do attack but… you know… it’s like autoattacking in Rift.  For the most part, pointless.  So, FYI , the Demo is the wizard/dps/blaster class, not the pet class.  As soon as I realized that, dropped that like a rock, unlocked necro and took that to 21-22ish – basically played it all the way through the intro zone.

The tutorial/intro/starter zone effectively cuts you off from the rest of the game world until level 21 or so.  And I mean completely cut off – as near as I can tell, highbie friends couldn’t even come and visit.  So I played through the entire thing just to get a feel for it.  It was… well, it had a story.  This is a good thing.  It had a story very specific to this world, which I liked.  I didn’t really like the story, but it exists.  I at least followed along and read about the plot points (contrast this to Rift where, with 3 level 20-25s now, I don’t think I’ve read a single line of plot).

I will say that one thing that kept me playing my necro was how good the tier 1/skill you use forever spell looked at low resolutions.  It makes daggers out of ice that look like broken shards of glass, but instead of just shooting them in a line like every other mmo, they kind of converge on your target from a sphere surrounding it.  I was like “Wow, if this looks tolerable at low res, it will be awesome cranked up, right?”  Unfortunately, no.  It doesn’t scale up that well.  So, the game looks pretty decent at the low end, but only so-so at the high end.  I don’t have any screen shots saved, but I’m sure you can find a ton by googling around.

Final thoughts:

• As far as F2P fantasy MMOs go, this one is really good.  I mean, for paying nothing you can do pretty much whatever you need to do (at least as far as I got – DO NOT FORGET to buy a bag from the vendor in the bar at night time).  I spent money to unlock a class, but if you’re happy playing one of the freebies, just go with that.  I suspect that most/all MMOs will offer a F2P option soon so, as the field grows, this one will look less and less compelling to cheap gamers.
• As far as MMOs that you pay for – I’m glad I never paid money for this one ;).
• Distinct (but aging – nothing near as bad as the previous generation though) visual style.  Also, the visuals feel “European” if that means anything to you.   Like, they feel a lot like some low-budget Euro games I’ve played over the years.  Especially the GUI….which needs work.
• Genuine, non-generic story & world flavor.

 

Category: columns, gaming, MMO Diaries, Video Games | 2 Comments »
Tags: Age of Conan, mmo

Posted By onefinemess on August 10, 2011

by : Steven Erikson

And now: back to our regularly scheduled Malazan reading.  Only one more book to go!

The middle 2/3 of this book was slow – perhaps purposely slow (and the author admits that it doesn’t follow “standard novel structure” or something like that in the intro), and therefor took me a while to get through.  The beginning and ending are solid in the sense that things happen but yeah, the middle wanders.  You definitely get a sense of the angst and aimlessness felt by the armies, especially in lacking knowledge of their purpose (seriously, wtf Tavore?).

More people get screwed over, some horribly (Onos…… :( :( :( ), some slightly less horribly.  OK, no, wait, no one who gets screwed over gets screwed over gently.  This is a hard world.  Where someone can get r#ped 20 or 30 times between pages.   Yeah… their story was so hard to read.  Jesus.  Rescuers die at the hands of random fate… armies are thrown together, tragically, by the same.

I’m curious who survived the finale.  We don’t get much.  I’d bet on certain people, but Erikson likes to kill off just about anyone… so I wouldn’t bet with any confidence.  Still, you’d think Tavore would make it, right?  I hope Quick Ben, Fid & Bottle made it… but I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t understand what the hell Icarnium was doing or how he wound up where he wound up doing what he done did… did he make new warrens inside himself?  Can’t wait for whenever we finally get his backstory.

Also, amazingly, I missed Karsa – what’s up with him and his kids?  Hopefully I don’t have to wait for the Esslemont book about Darjawhatistan to find out.

I feel terrible for most of the cast.  I think that’s kind of the point.  Can’t wait to see how it all blows up.  Bleeds out.  Burns.  You know… ends.

THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS

Because it was good, but the goodness didn’t carry hard enough in the middle.

Category: Book Review, Books | No Comments »
Tags: Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson

Posted By onefinemess on July 27, 2011

by: Jim Butcher

So.  300 pages into Dust of Dreams (Malazan #9) and this comes out.  I’d forgotten – I’m glad I put all the new book release dates  I care about in my calendar!

Anyway, I took a 10 or or so detour through Dresdenland on my way through Malazan – like I could wait another week to read this.  Hah.  Especially after the way Butcher ended Changes.  Balls!

I’m going to try and keep the spoilers here to a minimum and vague but I can’t avoid them entirely.

This book picks up seconds after the last one ended (sort of!  Wait till the end…) with Dresden being, well, dead.  Now, you and I know that he is only comic book dead – because Butcher is on record saying that the series has at least twenty books in it, and it seems unlikely that he would do them all with Dresden a ghost (but wouldn’t that be awesome/more ballsy?).  BUT, in the meantime we get to watch and wonder how he brings Harry back.

I mean, there are a ton of ways for that to happen in this world.  Hint: The way he does it it happens is the most obvious one.

What we get instead of a quest for Harry to return to life is, instead, what Harry thinks is a last hurrah for his eternal soul, sort of.  He’s sent back to Chicago with a task that, of course, he mostly ignores (although finds the answer somewhat accidentally) because his friends are in danger!   Duh.  So he goes around and charges into things and looks foolish a bit, as usual, then learns some stuff, as usual. I mean, we know the formula!  But it works!  It’s fun!  Homer this is not, you know?  This is “good times” reading, and it totally is.

Everyone gets more emo.  People actually say the word “emo”.  There are more Star Wars references.  X-Men & Star Trek, too!  Mort gets an upgrade.  Karrin gets her butt kicked and she’s OK with it.  Molly carries the weight of the world.  Harry finds a new ally.  We find out who killed Harry.  And, more importantly, who had him killed.

Oh, and Harry learns to stop and think.  Kind of.  He still mostly doesn’t, but he does sometimes.  I mean, he still mostly does what he would have done anyway, but  at least he does some analysis beforehand.

A couple bits about the climax didn’t make sense as I rolled them around in my brain.  Why couldn’t she just eat the other ghosts?  I mean.  Huh?  Also, why did she have to eat the specific ghosts she did?  Why not just the other huge horde of them she had milling around.

The “moral climax”, I guess, the decision Harry makes in the last section about coming to terms with what he is/will be also felt a little soft.  Like “He had to die to learn THAT?”.  It seemed kinda like basic knowledge.  I suppose I get why he died, from his side of things, but from a story angle I’m a little confused as to why that was necessary.    I’m guessing it’s because he learned a bunch about the spirit world in this book.  Not complaining, I’m sure it will all pop up again.

[edit: I guess it was probably to flush out the state of mind he was in at the end of Changes.  It's been long enough that it's not fresh in my mind, but I guess he was going to dark places and had to be reminded that he still had free will or something?  It doesn't stand out in my memory that he had forgotten that, or something... but maybe he was mentally consigning himself to be a monster, which would have allowed him to become an actual monster.]

FOUR STARS

Because it’s fun.  It’s what I expected, in a good way.

I forget how his brother’s (the lust vampire dude) thing with Justine works, but I suspect that the solution/final scene with him is going to be … mentioned a bit on the internet.

 

 

Category: Book Review, Books | No Comments »
Tags: Dresden Files, Ghost Story, Jim Butcher

Posted By onefinemess on July 26, 2011

I first tried Rift near the end of the beta – a friend got me in.  That same friend sent me a 7 day trial last week and I figured I’d give it another shot.

My initial impression of it was that it was an insanely bland looking fantasy mmo.  By “bland” I don’t mean that the graphics are bad, just completely lacking in character.  One thing I did love/respect/appreciate about WoW was how much the character & world design just “pops”.  It does.  Now, the cartoonish kind of style they have there may not work for you – but I still think it gives that place a great flavor all its own.  I haven’t seen anything like that in another fantasy MMO yet.  Everything kinda looks the same.  Rift is no different in this regard (my initial reaction still holds).

It does have some unique flavors: the rift invasions themselves look pretty unique and have a noticeable effect on the world – not to mention the way they manifest and dissolve is pretty well done.  It has a couple mounts that look neat, or are neat ideas at their core (two tailed foxes, two headed turtles, Star Wars looking pony horses), but the execution just falls flat for me.  Again – I want to clarify that they are not poorly done, I just don’t find them interesting or inspired.

Same with the armor and gear.  Speaking of, man I am spoiled by City of Heroes.  I am SO OVER gear.  CoH has a limited inventory/gear system – and that’s about as much as I want to deal with these days.  All 4 of my characters in Rift (I made one of each class) look pretty stupid.  None of them looks anywhere near as good as CoH LAUNCH character from 7 years ago.  Sure, the polys are smoother (they’d damn well better be!), but they just look like crap.  My highest level character is only 20, so “maybe” it gets better later… but “later” is worth nothing in my book.

Another gripe about armor & gear: not once have I been presented with a difficult gear choice.  Every item I have gotten has been either useless or better than my current gear.  In some ways this is a good thing – it saves me from having to think about my gear – but in another way it’s kind of… well, it’s not really a gear system if it’s not presenting any choices, is it?  This aspect I’m fairly sure improves later in game, espcially as you get planar & crafted gear and stuff, but in the 1-20 game, the equipment-sub-game is a snorefest.

Random gripe: autoattacking is a bizarre joke.  I’m trying to figure out why they even have it in the game.  So far they have all been slow and deal very little damage in relation to you skill attacks.  Plus, one of your skills is pretty much always ready to go, so why would you ever NOT use it an autoattack?  Out of end/mana lately?  The only time that has happened to me so far has been when I died.  Maybe it becomes relevant later in game…

Let’s look at the two big (only) selling points of this game:  The Rift system & the classs/”soul” system.

1. The rift system

Every so often a portal opens up somewhere (sometimes, right on top of you!) and an invasion from either the other pvp realm (but so far, just staffed with npcs) or an elemental plane (fire, air, water, earth (? haven’t seen that one yet), life or death) happens.  Or a raiding party sets out across the map with some kind of target you have to either defend or kill them before they get to.   These vary wildly in size from tiny single small rift events that you can (carefully) solo to fucking epic, map-covering events that take 20-40 people and an hour to clear.

The small ones are great, and add spice to things and have, so far, been really manageable and generally fun.
The large ones are also fun – IF you’re in the mood for a raid type event.  If you’re not, too bad, go to another zone, play another alt, or log out.  Because these events are srs bsns and can either remove all the quest npcs or kill them (and it took a while for them to respawn last time… I eventually just logged out in frustration).  I experienced the first one of these epic rift invasions last night and it was both a positive and negative experience.

Positive in that yes, it is fun to have an impromptu raid style event happen and have dozens of people trekking around on the map in caravans, killing giant bosses and the like.  Note that this would be super obnoxious without the free mount I recieved for signing up for the game via a friend (without the free mount, I may have barely been able to afford one of the normal ones).  The caravans of players move too fast, and if you fall behind you get annihilated by the rift spawns if you don’t know safe paths around the map.  The map terrain is odd, and didn’t seem to cater at all to making you way safely to the big rift event goal spots.  I died many, many times trying various paths to get to raid event spot alone.  Sticking with the group was by far the best way to go – but, if you happened to die in an event or something, it was really tough to catch back up without getting stuck in a death loop.

Negative in that, jesus christ I just wanted to turn in my quests and move the fuck on!  Instead I spent an hour+ clearing the event and then, when the npcs STILL didn’t respond, another 20 minutes trying to help with the “cleanup” (getting rid of dozens of tiny rifts left scattered across the map).  At that point I just logged because the npcs still hadn’t returned and something kept killing me.

I imagine (hope) that at higher levels there are more zone options available.  Maybe there is another 15-20 zone (aside from the pvp zones which I have no desire to visit), but it hadn’t been presented to me via the plot or quest chains yet.  If it exists, the devs would be wise to introduce players to it earlier so they can avoid zone events if they choose.  Then again… I suspect this is all by design.  How do you get your whole zone involved in a raid?  Give them very few other options.  Otherwise a large chunk of the players would just leave and grind elsewhere?  I dunno.

2.  The class/”soul” system

One of the big selling points of the game is that Rift is a multi-class game by design, from the ground up.

It will let you go all out dps or heal (probably tank too, I haven’t tried warrior much) if you really want. And I do mean “all out”.  One of the souls I was looking at had at least a dozen different healing effects.  I can’t see how you would ever NOT have four or five off cooldown.  I don’t know what kind of person would find that playstyle fun, but they must exist, because the trinity (tank/heal/dps) exists (at least in most mmos, I love how it mostly doesn’t in CoH!).

Generally, this seems to be ill-advised, at least for soloing.  All the solo specs I looked at (for cleric & mage), the ones that people say are actually good, involve a bunch of dps and a (usually instant) self heal.  Even the rogue spec I wound up going with was based around the bard soul, which has a maintain (you can’t do anything else while it is going) type attack that damages and heals.  There’s probably a warrior soul with some self healing too….

So, there are a handful (6-8ish) of souls for each of the four (warrior, rogue, cleric, mage) classes.  Each soul is something that might be a separate class in another game.  Like rogues have bard, ranger, assassin, etc. Mages have elementalist, pyromancer, necromancer, etc.  You can invest “soul points” in up to 3 soul “trees” at a time.  I have two separate builds unlocked on my mage (you can get up to 5, I think) – this allows you to switch between completely different builds & playstyles almost at will (I don’t think you can do it in combat, I haven’t tried as it takes a few seconds to trigger and despawns any pets you have).  On my mage I have one that favors elementalist then has a couple points in chloromancy for (you guessed it!) an instant heal.  The other build favors necromancer with some points in warlock (which gives me a second self-heal).  Both seem pretty strong, and definitely stronger than they would be if I didn’t mix souls.

I’m really not a fan of most of the individual souls, but the system in general seems to work as advertised. It’s something different at least.  So far, some of the souls seem pointless, but I’m sure they get a decent skill or two in there somewhere.

Other random thoughts:

• Many of the pets are ugly.   Seriously, graphics department – can you make these things any blander?  Earth elemental & warrior panther, I’m talking to you.  Even the shit pets should be given attention, especially given the amount of time we have to spend looking at them.
• You train up individual spell levels as you level up (as opposed to just having them scale with you – hello money sink!).   This should make the spells LOOK more interesting.  Especially for your first spell which, for the mages at least, seems to be something that you use the entire length of the game.  Nothing quite as interesting as staring at the same tiny blast for 50 levels.  Again, City of Heroes has me spoiled here.  Even the simplest attack looks generally awesome.
• I miss the side-kicking system.  Evidently this hasn’t spread to non-superhero mmos yet (in addition to CoH, Champions has it & I think DCU Online might as well).  This means that I have to wait how long to play with my friend’s level 45?  I suspect I will stop playing before I catch up, but I signed up for a month, so I’m going to see how far I can make it on my mage.

Overall I’d say it has some neat ideas, but just isn’t interesting enough to warrant playing unless you really want another fantasy mmo but are tired of all the other ones.

 

Category: gaming, Video Games | 2 Comments »
Tags: mmo, Rift, Rift game

Posted By onefinemess on July 18, 2011

by: George R. R. Martin

There will be some spoilers.  You have been warned.

First off, let me say that this was not the best book ever.  FOR ME.  I’m sure plenty of people will love it.  I think it works great as a piece of something larger but, for me, it did not work particularly well as a single book.  Me, as a reader, needed something more to latch onto at the end of the book.  I mean, the beginning and middle were pretty much what we/I expected – a bunch of politicking and pieces moving around on a giant chessboard, assembling themselves for the blowout that is the last book or two.  All well and good but… when Dany spends the entire book being a goddam idiot and doing nothing of substance (besides hopefully learning that she was an idiot), another main character is left in the middle of an assassination attempt, and the others are barely even heard from well… that’s not enough of an ending for me.

Don’t get me wrong, the ending works in the sense of the book as a piece of something larger, and the epilogue works in the sense of closing one chapter of the story “of the realm”… I guess I don’t really care that much about the realm, I care about the individuals that populate it.  And none of the ones I care about had an ending that made me feel any kind of satisfaction.

Selfish of me, I know.  But hey, it’s my reading experience.

NOTE:  The prologue works as a kind of replacement epilogue for one of the characters with *some* kind of meat in it for me if you want to look at it that way.  But it’s not quite enough.

There are some great observations and theories in the thread over at Anibundel’s blog (Thanks for having the party, Ani!), including several things that I missed – the identities of Abel & his women for one.  Yes I know it’s a huge DUH but the lack of a time sync between the chapters there lost me.  I’m still a little confused as to how he could have gotten in place before Stannis’ army… but I’m sure it makes sense and someone has a nice chronology worked out somewhere.  Also, the bit about some Freys getting eaten.  Man, I hope that one is true.

Here are a couple of my thoughts:

• The subplot with the Dornish prince could have been thrown out.  I’m sure it sets the stage for other stuff later on, but it was just a big bleh for me.  I would have much rather given that page space over to pretty much anyone else (even Davos! …although maybe not Cersei…).
• The title of the book is misleading in the most common reading.  There is very little dragon dancing (or even dragons moving in general).  The majority of the dancing is done by slaves and the dragons spent most of their time in chains.  Kate Cox pointed out another reading to me, which I think is much more applicable to the book as a whole – “dragons” are a form of coinage (Yes, I forget basic things).  And pretty much everyone in this book is scrambling for coin or throwing the weight of coin around in one way or another.  Hell, the Watch up on the Wall even have a bit of a subplot about their need for coinage.  Someone is killed with a (physical) coin!  And HELLO – is that a coin on the cover?  Or a shield?  If it’s a shield it’s still round like a coin!
• There was no Sansa.  I think GRRM did this as some kind of peace offering for what he does to the MCs that are present, but it wasn’t enough for me.
• Weird wordpress lag just erased my other two points, then I forgot them when I had to dart into the boys room (because it takes them 90 minutes to fall asleep…).  I promise they were genius!   <.<
• [edit: I remembered one!]  What’s up with Rhyllor?  He’s the only deity in this world that can actively grant prayers with power?  That seems REALLY REALLY fishy, doesn’t it?  My initial guess was that the religion was a calcified form of fire magic (ie there is no god at all, the rituals of worship taught the users how to access a flavor of magic) that became a religion during the course of the time when there wasn’t much magic.  The other two possibilities seem to be A) All the other gods are dicks/lazy/locked up somewhere or B) Rhyllor actually is the “true god” (with the “one who shall not be named” as his negative counterpart).  I would find this pretty funny, but it doesn’t “feel” right to me.

My one random prediction:  Jon Snow will skinshift into a dragon at some point.  If he doesn’t, then … I dunno, GRRM will have wasted a damn-shame-ton of setup.

THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS

Because it’s still damn good, and a piece of something even damner gooder, and very well written, but it just wasn’t enough for me on its own merits.  It didn’t pull me through the pages like past volumes have – some of this could be due to age, or a change in my reading taste… but my enjoyment level is what it is.

It will round up to 4 stars on librarything (that’s not everything I’ve read, just everything I have in the house) anyway.

P.S.: Bolton’s Bastard needs to die with a quickness.  Preferably off-page.  He doesn’t deserve an on-page death.  I don’t think there’s any kind of torture or pain he could suffer that would be anything close to what he deserves, and I’d rather not read GRRM trying to write up something like that.  It would probably keep me up for a while.

Category: Book Review, Books | No Comments »
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, George RR Martin

Posted By onefinemess on July 14, 2011

Let’s just get this out of the way first: I didn’t hate it.  I don’t feel like I wasted $6.

Yes, I saw it at the cheap theater. The normal ones are like $10.50 at night.  Ugh.  So, a better question would be – was it worth $10.50?  The answer there is “maybe”.

It really depends on what you expect from these things, I guess.  And by “these things” I mean “summer blockbusters”, because that’s all this was.  I think that, in the sense that this movie was targeted (even moreso than the standard male gaze) at teenage males and the teenage male locked not particularly tightly inside every adult male … it succeeds.  I mean, the special effects are indeed, fucking crazy.  The robots look great.  The ruined city set piece was great.  The falling building scene was pretty crazy.  The re-created historical scenes were neat.  Scenes with people flying all over and being caught by robots looked about as good as they could.  I mean, until we get our stunt robots trained up well enough that we don’t have to replace them with CGI in the action scenes at least.

Not to say I’m defending the movie – I mean, if you apply any kind of “serious criticism” (if such a thing exists, sometimes I’m not convinced) to the movie, pretty much everything falls apart.  My thoughts just run more along the lines of “Why would you defend it?”

A) It’s not worth it
B) You would lose that debate
C) There is nothing in this movie that asked me to be taken seriously

You know how people call things “films”? I wouldn’t call this that.

The plot had more holes and motivational wtfs than a zombified piece of sentient swiss cheese gardening.  But GIANT ROBOTS.  I guess maybe they shouldn’t inherently preclude seriousness… but at least for this incarnation of the franchise, for me, they do.   We know what to expect by now, right?

Sure, I’d love for someone to relaunch the franchise and do it up with a little more “respect” and seriousness and much less women running in high heels and robots that weren’t so damn shiny .   Maybe that would be the kind of movie I could consider thinking about seriously.  For this one, I just wanted to pay a couple bucks and see giant robots.

One thing that really annoyed me (even more than the zooms on Rosie’s face and awkward butt camera angles (a given with Bay, right?)) was that in one scene an Autobot kicked a defeated Decepticon into a potentially inhabited building (which exploded, even though plenty of times we see robots getting pulled apart without exploding – like I said, nothing makes consistent sense if you think about it too long).  Um?   That is not something an Autobot would ever do.  As an extension of that, none of the Autobots made any effort (that I could see) to avoid collateral damage – they seem to avoid intentionally killing humans but uh… don’t care much about doing it on accident.  Very not Autobot.

Final verdict?

Worth $6 to see on the big screen.

I didn’t see it in 3d, so I can’t speak to that.

 

 

 

Category: Movie Review, Movies | No Comments »
Tags: Transformers

Posted By onefinemess on July 13, 2011

by: Ian C. Esslemont

I should have written this last night, before I started A Dance with Dragons, because now that’s mostly what’s on my mind… but let’s see what I can recall.

ARGH. WordPress 3.2.1 made my dashboard even less functional and obnoxious.  Wait, what?  BOOK?  Right.

OK.  This book was not awesome.  It was par.

Stuff happened, and I kind of cared, but mostly I didn’t.  I couldn’t exactly tell you why, other than that the opening was decent, but when they swung away (perspective wise) from Greybeard and Kyle it just lost me.  The parts with Iron Bars were still interesting, as I like the guy and feel bad for him because he keeps getting totally shit on… or, in this case, has someone wedge their hand in between his ribs and squeeze on his heart for long periods of time.

The fact that the book left Greybeard’s initial acquiring of Stoneweilder as well as the prophecy basically unexplained was a huge, huge detriment.  The resolution came basically out of nowhere (not totally, but enough) and felt stupid.  Plus, now we’ll never know what the Riders said to him?  I was hoping we’d find out wtf they are in the next book, but it looks like their plot is resolved here??

I’m really confused as to why and how exactly giant god woman ties in with the Goddess (who I’m *guessing* was related to the fall of jade giants/Broken/Shattered God…maybe?).  She had to know what the riders were after (and that they were indeed somewhat benign towards things outside their goal) – why in the world would she help the humans build the Stormwall?  I mean, I’m sure there was a reason, but the information given in this volume was sorely lacking.

All the stuff with Pyke was a horrible waste of paper.  They should (and would, I would think) have just killed him and been done with it early.  Why did ICE keep him around that long?  Just to show that yes, everyone was right?  ?

I was hoping to find out something about the Moranth here… but nope.

Hell, I’m not even exactly clear on what happened with Greybeard and the 6th originally… I think that info is all out there, but requires too much brain work for me to put together at the moment.  Google, here I come!

There wasn’t enough new info about the world of Malazan to justify the bland writing here.

I did really like Ipshank & Manask  – although I wish I’d gotten a better visual of Manask and his armor setup, not to mention whatever role they played in the original invasion.

Rillish was also good, but his interaction with Greymane was annoying – we find out in the end that they were both (?) operating under various misconceptions and it just annoyed me as a reader.  It’s a common enough writing trope (?), but it really didn’t work for me here.

Also… so much secrecy in the Malazan invasion plan as well as the Liberation Army (?) plans.   Like, seriously?  No one tells anyone anything?  While it might make for more suspense, it also makes for more annoyance.

TWO AND THREE QUARTER STARS

Because it was definitely not as good as Return of the Crimson Guard and while it might have been a little better written than Night of Knives, NoK was … more satisfying?  Maybe?

Also – the quality drop from Crimson Guard feels noticeable, but this could just be me.   I didn’t dislike the book, it just didn’t give me what I wanted.  The plot lines that were resolved were not resolved satisfactorily to me, and the background that I would have liked to have on some characters wasn’t there.

We’ll see how I feel about it after I finish The Crippled God (which might fill in some other holes).

[edited: updated a little.]

Category: Book Review, Books | No Comments »
Tags: Malazan Book of the Fallen