Posts Tagged ‘ currently playing ’

Currently Playing: Diablo 3

Diablo 3 is a really marvelous game that is flawed in some areas. It tries so hard to be better than it’s predecessors and on most account achieves it but there are other areas where they shouldn’t have touched. There are many changes that anyone who has played any previous Diablo games will see when they start playing Diablo 3. Skill trees are gone and replaced with rune systems. Special monsters with abilities are of more importance than bosses now. And most importantly the sense of item hunt has disappear and replaced by an Auction House.

Just to start things off, I really do not like the idea of the Auction House. As I said before, it takes away the item hunts and sense of achievement when you get something better than your items. I understand that Blizzard had to add the auction house but I’m not sure if it was really there for gamers in mind. From what I understand, the auction house main purpose is to fight against gold farmers. You are allowed to either use in-game gold or real money to buy items in the auction house. The latter being not available currently but I would like to know how the situation of the auction house changes with real money involved. As of right now, you can get most of your character’s items from the auction house for really cheap. Sure you still have to play the game to level up your character and progress through each of the game’s four difficulty but you don’t have to worry about getting items. The strange thing is that you can buy the item, say a chest armor, for 10,000 gold. Then after you wear it and you level up with it, you find another chest armor with better stats for your current level for 10,000. Well you can buy it and then sell off the old chest armor for 10,000. Someone else is bound to buy it again from you. This continues the forever trend of the auction house that I came to notice. It is cheating using the auction house but I feel that Blizzard has the auction house for a reason. There are times when you feel super powerful because you just bought two brand new powerful axes from the auction house. The sense of power you get from using the new items are amazing. One moment you may be struggling with a boss or a special enemy and another moment you’re blasting through them with full health. The thing that I really miss is that this eliminates the feeling of an achievement when you buy these items. You didn’t get these items, someone else did. The items you find seem meaningless to the items you bought. Sure I may find a Legendary item or some powerful rare item but those are very rare chances. Why play through the same areas hoping to get a specific armor or weapon when you can look specifically for the item you want in the auction house? This is one of the main reasons why I haven’t played as much as I use to.

The eliminations of the skill tree system is a pretty risky idea that Blizzard has played. At first it is very strange that you can pick different skills anytime. It makes you wonder if you’re even getting more powerful with the skills. In theory you aren’t getting more powerful. The skills you unlocked in the later levels may be weaker to you than the skills you already had when you started the game. This new system gives the player choices. You pick what you want to use for a certain situation and test out if it is a good pick. It is similar to load outs in that each boss or special enemy is a match that you need to figure out. You may need to use a health healing attack, one that increases your attack speed, or one that slows down enemies. It is all different for different kind of situations. On the easier difficulties it doesn’t matter what skills you use as you’ll mostly be using skills that you’re comfortable with. On harder difficulties however, you need to pick certain skills that makes sense for those situations. It gives a sense of strategy that is balanced out by the aforementioned auction house item buying.

The last thing that I notice that is changed in Diablo 3 is the way how special monsters are handled. For every step up in difficulty, they have an additional new ability they can use. On Inferno, they have four abilities that can all be used at once. Abilities are most likely chosen random for every special monsters which means every special monsters may have a way to kill you quickly. It makes these monsters harder than most of the bosses in Diablo 3. I believe that is why Blizzard has put more emphasis on these special monsters than the bosses. Sure with bosses you’re still bound to get better items or rarer items. However in Inferno, killing these special monsters gives you a boost that will help you get better items. This boost lasts for 30 minutes and it can be stacked. So you can theoretically kill multiple special monsters before going to a boss and killing him. Though it is possible, Inferno is a pain in the ass to even fight a special monster.

Anyways, Diablo 3 is an awesome game. The changes that Blizzard made helped introduce Diablo to a new generation and a wider audience. However I feel that some of the changes made Diablo 3 lose some of its charms. The sense of gratification that is received from an item hunt is now gone in place of an Auction House. Because of that, I keep wondering why I keep playing the game. It is fun to level up and kill a room full of monsters but I’m not sure how much it could last. I’m hoping Blizzard may patch something that will make it stand out more but as of now I haven’t gone back to Diablo 3 in a while. I don’t think I will until I hear some changes are made or the economy of the auction house is balanced when the paid auction house is released. So this game is worth a try but it is not worth hyping about as I thought it was before release.

2012
05/31
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Currently Playing: Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded

I feel like I’m a masochist when it comes to Kingdom Hearts games. I will still play any Kingdom Hearts game no matter how bad it is or how much the games don’t add anything to the overarching stories. Fortunately Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded is somewhere in the middle. It isn’t a bad game but the story really doesn’t do much for me so far.

What I can tell you is that it plays really similar to the PSP’s Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep. The fighting is similar to it in that you do not get to bring two team mates along with you unlike the console games. I don’t want to get into too deeply about the combat yet but so far the combat is different and better for it.

Another thing that they tried to do differently is a leveling grid type matrix. What that really means is that it is really similar to the grid system that is used in Final Fantasy X. It is fun and gave me a little more control over what I’m actually unlocking.

One last thing they added was the ability to combine two abilities to make a more powerful version. You basically can combine two abilities that you’ve put enough experience in. You can get the experience from using the abilities inside battles. This is kind of addicting but I found my usual skill lists already so I’m finding it annoying now trying to gain experiences for the abilities that are less powerful just to combine them with the powerful one. I guess it’s keeping things from getting repetitive.

Oh and speaking of repetitive, Kingdom Hearts games are known for repetitiveness and this game reeks of it. Same music, same character models, and even same environments I believe. But it’s Kingdom Hearts so they add something new to it that makes me want to play it. The only thing I found that is really new in my 5 hr playtime are the cutscenes (four so far!). Hopefully more new stuff comes once it gets to the end.

2012
04/26
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Diablo 3 Beta Review Currently Playing

Blizzard has been dominating the PC gaming for years and they are definitely on a roll right now considering the chain of successes Blizzard has done in the last 18 years since 1994 Warcraft: Orcs and humans. Now considering that the company has been on a spree of success with such games as Warcraft, Starcraft, and World of Warcraft does Diablo 3 live up to the standard that Blizzard has set?

Let me start off from the beginning of the game’s character selection. I say character selection instead of character creation because rather than making a character, you select one out of five heroes. I can understand Blizzard wanting to stay in the old roots that both predecessors had, but I find it rather outdated if not lazy. I don’t mean to beat on it too much but one of the greatest things about playing any online game, especially a role playing game is having a unique look. Blizzard also decided to lower the amount of heroes to choose from. In Diablo 2 it was originally 7 and now it has been dropped down to 5. There will most likely be expansions that will include other classes but as of now its 5.

The heroes in this game are the Barbarian, Demon hunter, Monk, Witch doctor, and the Wizard. I mainly played the Wizard but I did play with a few friends and got to hear and examine their abilities. I will only review the one I played cause it is only fair that I do it that way and not pass judgement on things that I do not know clearly. The Wizard hero is the basic casting type, he shoots projectiles and does a lot of AOEs (Area of Effects). I did enjoy playing this character due to the fact that he can keep a good distance and has a lot of crowd control abilities like frost ray and frost wave, which either slow down enemies or freeze them in their place. This hero’s abilities revolve around his arcane power (mana). Now the issue with some games is that if you run out of mana, your casting hero would probably use melee attacks to finish off the enemies. Which I found in most cases pretty stupid and very ineffective. However, with Diablo 3 you basically get a primary ability which is interchangeable with other primary skills. The ability reusable even with no mana even considering you regenerate mana faster than your primary skills can use. I was able to keep up the damage without the need for wasting a mana potion. The beta was very limited with the skills so I can’t go really in depth with abilities since the future spells could possibly change the hero’s gameplay completely.

After you create your hero you get to watch some cinematic scenes and listen to some lore. The first thing you will notice about Diable 3 once the game starts is that it will remind you about the predecessors pretty fast. Its dark, gloomy, and full of monsters roaming the earth. The graphics for the game are pretty good although I had low frames per second compare to other games with a 3d world. I play a lot of different computer games and I found this to be a rather big issue to start with. Maybe it is just a beta issue and can be fixed later on. The first change that I caught rather quick was that your hero actually talks now. In the older Diablo games your hero was a silent protagonist. The voice acting is pretty good and there isn’t a lot of it to the point that it is annoying you but also not very little so you would not feel like their isn’t a story. The game sticks to its roots pretty well by making everything destructible such as barrels graves and certain spots like chandeliers. Questing in this game is the same as every other action rpg. Its mainly pick up quest and do as quest says. Most likely the quests will be either find X person or kill X monster. As for the other features of the game such as crafting its very simple and direct. All you have to do is get gold and upgrade the blacksmith crafting spot and he will unlock more schematics. Then you give him X item and he creates the item for you. As for socketing gems in armor it wasn’t implemented in the beta and I will get back to it when it does become implemented. The auction house feature is like any other auction house in other games, you put up the item for real money or game currency then the consumer will either bid or buy item depending on what options the seller put in.

This game so far seems like the old Diablo games with better graphics and some slight tweaks, this game won’t be out until May 15th and I will be able to give a real review on it when it does release.

2012
04/25
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Currently Playing: Darksiders

I’ve been in and out of this game for quite a while now. I even though about getting the superior version on the PC but I decided to stick to my 360 copy. After hearing so many good things from Patrick Klepek at Giant Bomb, I decided I should try finishing this game. At least finish before the sequel and see if the sequel lives up to this game.

Darksiders is a game that can be described as a fan-service game. No not anime kind of fan service but more of a gaming kind of fan service. What I mean is it combines many mechanics from a lot of great games and also add it’s own ingredients into the mix. This game is pretty much 70% Zelda, 20% God of war/DMC, 5% random games, and 5% original. This game may not be original but it copies the mechanics so well that I tend to forgive it. It has dungeons and weapons like Zelda but sometimes it does it better than Zelda. For example, in Zelda you have to do some repetitive mechanic to summon your horse and then wait for your horse to get to you. In Darksiders, all you need to do is press a button and your horse comes out of the ground.  There are some stuff that could have done better like the dungeon design but so far I’m really enjoying it.

The combat is also nice and compare nicely to DMC or God of War. I really like the weighty feel of War’s sword when he swings it. It really brings out an impact to everything he hits. The story is also pretty original. It involves the four horsemen trying to make things right when all hell breaks lose on Earth. It’s not a great story so far but playing as one of the horsemen is pretty exciting. I don’t think I’ll beat this game for a while but I will be sure to write another post about it soon!

2012
04/17
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Currently Playing: Ace Combat Assault Horizon

This will be a short one since I briefly played Ace Combat. I was never really a big fan of Ace Combat. I always thought that the air combat was too slow and got a little repetitive. Everything also looked the same after a while and you’re mostly doing the same thing. However, after playing the demo of this game, I figure that I have to give this game a shot since it feels so different from a regular Ace Combat game.

The new feature they added is a mechanic called “Dog-Fight mode” where the player is basically locked-on to the enemy target. When the player is locked-on, the plane moves and follows the enemy automatically. What the player has to manage is the speed of your aircraft and the targeting for missiles and machine guns. Being close to the enemy allows the player to get a better lock on for missiles but also give the enemy a better chance to counter maneuver you. Most of these dog fights become very cinematic as planes are counter maneuvering each other trying to get lock on for missiles. I only tried one online match and I can tell you that it is crazy as there are usually about 6 planes locked on to each other back to back. Since the player doesn’t need to direct the aircraft when locked on, I was surprise to see some amazing enemy scripting as they take you through buildings and factories to out maneuver you. This got me interested to keep doing these dog fights in single player mode. I can see this dog fight mechanic getting old real quickly if it wasn’t for some shnazzy enemy scripting.

Oh and before I close this post, I have to say that the non-airplane parts are one of the most boring parts of the game. Especially the helicopter where you’re doing the same thing over for 20 minutes. It isn’t even a challenge at all and I hope there aren’t that many of those missions. I’m only 4 missions into the game so I guess we will see.

2012
04/12
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Currently Playing: Driver: San Francisco

Driver: San Francisco has got to be one of the most enjoyable and relaxing games I have played in a while. Yes there were Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim and such but those games were all so dark and gloomy compared to what Driver is. The game for me feels like a Burnout game with a story. The driving is fast and chaotic with newspaper flying everywhere, smokes coming out of the car and ramps created from San Francisco hills.

The game would have been a fun game already even if they didn’t add in their unique ‘shift’ feature but that feature really adds into the chaotic nature of the game. Using the shift mechanic, the player is allow to shift to any car they want to with a few exceptions like enemies and cop cars if they are chasing you. Using this feature, the player can take control of oncoming traffic and ram into enemies or cop cars. They even support this idea by giving the player a ram ability where the more you hold down the ram button, the harder the hit.

With all these features, the developers found a way to make certain side missions super interesting. The one I remember most recently is a mission where I had to drive a small car under a Semi-Truck to disable a bomb under it. But I had to shift into other small cars around San Francisco because there were more than one bomb. And I really like that these missions don’t repeat and it actually adds up to the story. Granted I’ll probably never play this game again once I’m done with it but the game really made me want to play all the side missions before even starting the main mission. I wanted to see what crazy things the game wants me to do.

I am about two chapters away from the ending so next post will probably be about my thoughts on the game. There are a lot more I want to say about this game but I think I will wait until the next post. However, the game has been very enjoyable and is a very nice change from all the gloomy apocalyptic bloddy reaper dragons. It is a game that you want to play if you just want to relax and play a video game for what they were created to be.

2012
04/05
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