Ekrund Campaign: Day 1

My non-beta adventure in Warhammer Online officially began on Sunday with the Collectors Edition Head Start. Originally, they had planned to start it at 7am EDT, then 1pm, then 12. That worked out fine for me, as I did not have to get up early or anything.

Me and my fellow CoW's logged in as soon as the servers un-grey'd. I was able to secure 2 names I wanted, so that is good. I was on the Order side and had no queuing issues that others have had.

A recap of what I did:

• Werit the Dwarven Engineer arrives in Ekrund to take up the Oathbearer cause.
• Achieved battle Rank 5 and Renown Rank 4.
• Did most of the starting quests.
• Did the first PQ a couple times and maximized my Chapter 1 influence. Best finish was #3.
  
• Found a Plunger! It told me it was not secret enough and to go find others.
  
• Read through all of my Tome entries. Very neat stuff in there.
• Picked up Scavenging and Talisman making.
• Did a few Gates of Ekrund scenarios.
• Guild reached Rank 2 when I logged off.
  
• Total play time was about 2.5 hours.

It was pretty fun and problem free. I am trying to take the game slow and stop to smell the roses. The changes to the Engineer class have been nice. I feel like I am more dangerous in scenarios now. The new turret animations are nice!

That about covers it for Day 1.

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28 minutes later...

I changed the channel.

I am speaking of the movie 28 Weeks Later. I was in a movie mood last weekend and saw this was On Demand, for free. I am not a huge Zombie flick fan, but the first one was decent, so I gave it a shot.

**Spoilers***

I knew it was going to suck after the opening scene. Basically, there was a husband and wife being attacked by zombies in a house. The wife runs off to save some kid she met 2 minutes ago and zombies get in between her and the husband. Remember, these are fast super-zombies in the 28 series, so the husband could really do nothing. He ran, leaving the wife to her fate.

We never do see a death blow and the husband is made to be a coward. Next we see their kids coming back to London. During a medical exam, the Doctor notices the boy has different color eyes. This is a genetic oddity he got from his mother. Very subtle fore shadowing! Fast forward a few minutes over stupid plot holes and stupid kids... the mother is alive. and back at the compound for study.

it just so happens that the father (husband) is a janitor and can access every single room of this military installation, including the unguarded Zombie room. Next, I turned it off. I checked out imdb to confirm my suspicions that the rest of the movie was a waste of time, and it was. I also realized it was made by different people than the original, 28 Days Later.

Beware: It sounds like they setup for yet another lame sequel!

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Spore Impressions (real early)

So Spore came in the mail today, yay! I am installing it as we speak.

Now I know Spore has some crappy DRM, but it does not start there. They have this thing packaged in like 42 layers. I don't know what kind of magic trick folks used to get passed just CD/DVD wrapping, but it wasn't good enough. EA decided to step it up a notch by having the wrappeing attached to the out box.

The DRM is making more angry the more I think about it. I do not like strange drivers on my system. Also, I can only install 3 times before I have to call them? That is really a bunch of BS. Yet here I am installing it, so I suck too.

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Classics: Scorched Earth

Scorched Earth was a multi-player PC game that was popular in the early 90's. The basic premise was you controlled a piece of artillery, on a 2D destructible landscape, mostly mountains. Your opponents were scatted around the board as well. You all took turns shooting each other with a variety of weapons. The challenge was to line up the correct angles to actually hit your target.

I remember me and a bunch of grade school friends getting playing this at a friends house. it seemed pretty amazing then, and it was a lot of fun. There were some pretty big weapons that you could purchase, which took out a large chunk of the landscape. MIRV, a warhead which separated into multiple warheads (3 I think), was always fun as well.

The reason this game came to mind is that a real-time Scorched Earth is coming to X-Box Live, called Death Tank. This game was actually on the Sega Saturn, an Easter egg in Duke Nukem 3d. They have upgraded it a lot for the X-Box hardware. The old version was turn based, so we will have to see how this one goes. I will likely download the demo at least. Check out a gameplay video:


Death Tank XBLA from Rlan on Vimeo.

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Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'em

"It feels good when you know you're down" - MC Hammer

Over this weekends Preview for WAR (and Open Beta) I decided to roll a Warrior Priest. Bald, armored and a big hammer. How can you go wrong?

I only have played up to rank 6 so far, so anything I say only applies up to that point.

The WP's mechanic is Righteous Fury. It is like mana, in that it regenerates and tries to stay full. When certain skills are used, it drains the Righteous Fury. Other skills have a side effect of filling it up.

The WP is a melee healer. This is a new class for me as I never really played anything like it before. With a normal healer, you generally just hand back and play whack-a-mole with healing bars. Not really so with the WP. You must get in there in fight in order to keep your Righteous Fury filled.

I actually found this class to be pretty difficult to play as a healer. When playing solo, or just healing myself, it was great fun. taking a beating and being able to heal yourself is quite nice. However, trying to fight and heal myself and others became pretty difficult.

This could just be because of my lack of keyboarding skills or some other deficiency. It seems like the WP healing is only really meant to be targeted at a single target throughout the fight. The WP does have access to AoE healing, like Prayer of Devotion and Divine Strike.

Overall it was a fun and interesting class. I will likely roll a WP alt, as being able to fight and heal is fun.

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Friday Question: Guild Taxes

"Read my lips: No new taxes." - George H. W. Bush, 1988

One of Warhammer Online's Guild features is the tax and tithe system. A tax is money taken off the top of whatever you do (i.e. sell and loot) and put into the guild bank. A tithe is a voluntary tax which you can set on yourself, which also goes into the guild bank.

I think they are fine, so long as your Guilds leadership actually uses them for the good of the guild. As for tithing, if the tax rate is low, and money is plentiful, I will likely set a tithe.

What are your feelings about Guild taxes?

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Artificial Butter

Fox Sports had some great commercials about 8 years ago. They were for the NBA and were hilarious. Sadly they only made 4 of them. These are probably my favorite commercials, ever. Here is one...

Fox Sports Basketball Commercial - Artificial Butter | Viral | SPIKE.com

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Swordnoob

During the WAR preview weekend, I also tried the High Elf Swordmaster. I only took this character up to Rank 6. Again, I primarily did RvR Scenarios and Open World. The Swordmaster has a tiered mechanic. Your tier skills open up the second tier, and the second tier opens up the third. Everything below only applies to Rank 6 and below.

I am a shield kinda guy, so I went with that and a 1h sword. Your first skill is Graceful Strike. it is a nice damage attack, that applies a DoT and generates hate (threat). It will also put you into Improved Stance.

The Swordmaster is a tank class, so it does get a throw attack. I like the fact it can be much more powerful if you his someone with it from behind. That's what you get for trying to run away!

When you are in improved stance, you get Quick Incision. This is a damage skill and applies a slow on the target. Another nice Improved Stance skill is Eagle's Flight. It does damage, and increase your chance to parry. Avoidance is usually a nice thing to have when fighting multiple Black Orcs.

Nature's Blade is an interesting buff you can apply to yourself. You get a chance to steal a certain amount of points from a random stat on your enemy, for a short duration. So you could steal the Strength from the big Chosen you are fighting and use it against him. I wish there was more feedback on when this happens and what you steal. I really had no idea if it was working.

I only had one Perfect Stance attack at this point, Blurring Shock. It is a higher damage attack and resets you back to normal stance.

Overall, I really did not enjoy my time as a Swordmaster much. This is not due to the class itself as it is interesting and powerful. I just had a lot of trouble with the stance dance mechanic. I am a keyboard user for skills. I really had a tough time keeping track of what Stance I was in and what skill to hit. It got to be a bit aggravating.

With more time and practice, I am sure I would improve. However there are so many interesting classes, Swordmaster will probably be one of the last I roll when the game launches.

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Classics: F19 Stealth Fighter

F19 Stealth Fighter is one of my all-time favorite games. It was probably the first computer game that I played constantly.

I was young at the time, so I really did not understand all of the concepts. I played on my Dad's CGA (4 color) 286 PC at the time. F19 is a flight simulator game that takes place in Europe and the Middle East (crazy huh?). The game came out around 1988. You were the pilot of the secret stealth fighter, which would later turn out to be the F-117. At the time though, no one knew what it was called, hence the F19.

There was a career mode and medals you could earn by completing missions. Missions ranged from destroying ground targets to air targets. The graphics were great at the time.. you could fly under a bridge! The enemies were realistic and the technology at your disposal was incredibly cool and real.

Two of the concepts I could not grasp were landing and the stealth game. I would normally just eject rather than land, since I was so awful at it. The game features a very detailed stealth/radar system so you were supposed to get to your target quietly in most cases. I could not grasp this and just went in with guns a blazing. It was fun none-the less. Another great thing about this game is the manual. It is a 200 page book. Not one of those little handbooks.. we are talking ~8x6 sized pages. It is one of the best parts of the game. I always hate what is shipped with games today in those small little boxes.

Recently I cam across a copy of the game on ebay and had to pick it up. It came with the manual, maps and 3 5.25 floppies. Sure, I don't have a drive that can read them, but it is nice to know they are there.

(This is actually a post from an old blog attempt)

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Hey Merc, nice bike!

The post title is from a new game I am playing on the 360, Mercenaries 2. I picked it up yesterday and probably have put 3 hours into it so far.

Bottom line: It is a fun game so far. I can't really speak to the rest of the game yet.

M2 is similar to Grand Theft Auto (GTA) in that it is a sandbox style game. The basic premise is that you did a job for someone, they try to kill you and worse yet, they did not pay you. Now it is payback time.

Unlike GTA, this game is all about blowing stuff up. Tanks, artillery, daisy cutters, choppers, boats, guided bombs... they are all at your disposal. The physics engine makes sure you get the feel that you just blew the crap out of something.

You are not really fighting this war alone, as you can recruit other mercenaries to help. So far I have a helicopter pilot. He allows you to transport around easier. he also is used to pick up found artillery, fuel tanks and stacks of cash. The stacks of cash remind me of NARC.

You also work for, with or against various factions. So far I have done work for the Oil Company. The factions help you get closer to your ultimate revenge and they also get you the tools you need to survive. In addition to money and information, they also give you supply drops, air strikes and vehicles which you can have dropped off. There are a lot of these in the game, so there is plenty to do.

If you enjoyed the movie Commando and like sandbox games, this may be worth a buy. Back to playing!

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