Guild Wars 2 First Impressions

Meng is gon' fuck you up son.

This game is the shit.
Like. Seriously.

I dont even know where to start with how satisfying this game is. This post is a VERY SHORT look at the game, from an early impression.

The world:
Is beautiful, vivid, and begging to be explored. If you ever played assassins creed and felt yourself wanting to climb up the guard posts to synchronize you will have a goddamn field day in guild wars 2 where you can spend hours just exploring the world, finding viewpoints, doing world puzzles and so on. I have spent about 10 hours playing, and i feel like I have just scratched the surface, my world explore % is at about 8% now, the zones are so massive its awesome.

One of the more irritating jumping puzzles

A little jumping puzzle to get to the viewpoint

The world is gigantic.

The Combat:
Is mmo combat, they have tried their best to make it more action based, and to some extent they have done so, its not quite on the same level as Age of Conan, but the active dodge system and active skills with fast cooldowns are a little more exciting than the combat in WoW for example.

The PVP:
World vs World vs World is pretty much as cool as it sounds, 40v40 battlegrounds are so last season, a bigass world where you can be in a small or large group and rock objectives is awesome, there are always people around, and the fights are crazy. Servers will protect their castles when they come under attack, and will go on the offensive to take castles/supply depots when they have enough people. You also gain exp, money and even drops from fighting in PVP, and its a reasonable amount too. I have no doubt that there will be level 80's who level purely from fighting in WvWvW.

There are random raid boss things in WvWvW as well

We failed a push against a tower, and about 30 players jumped us, those in frontline got dunked.

The 'Story' :
Its an mmo, yet it has a singleplayer style story and narrative - the quests are pretty optional as far as i know, but its a nice touch. Maybe you arent massive on the whole teamwork thing, no problem, solo the game and pretend its a singleplayer game.

Game mechanics:
The game really did a few mechanics right, for example, there is no killstealing or loot stealing, if you are soloing a mob and then 8 dudes come over and kill it, you all get xp and loot, everyone wins.
This little change in mechanics means everyone is now on the same team, if you all help each other out, everyone gets more xp and drops, lets form an impromptu party and slay everything! - this is much easier than forming an actual party, requires no talk between players, and has no commitment. Awesome. The same goes for skill bosses, special elites which when defeated, give a skill point, everyone that participates will get the point, and the mob is generally too hard to kill alone, so help each other out!
I really like the random event system they have going as well, a particular example which sticks out is bears randomly coming out of the forest to attack a town that I was in, whilst I was using a vendor. All nearby players are informed of the event, so help is usually quick to come.

I guess this will help with Meatoberfest at least (an actual ingame event)

tldr: Get the game and come and fucking play with me, my playername is Mengplex

Mastermind.li

So www.mastermind.li is like an online internet version of Risk.
Conceptually, this is awesome.
In practice however, the game is slow, boring, snowbally, slow and tedious. Basically, the game isnt worth playing... yet.
A few of the problems that I can see are:
- It uses a pseudo real time system, both for resource generation and for combat , this results in people getting bored way before the game has ended
- The servers are shit, and everything takes way too many clicks to get done (this is the major one)
- Little too much emphasis on luck, both in combat, and the country you get when you start the game (ive started in Africa twice, and it sucks because the countries generate no income)
- Neutral countries require way too much strength to capture
- People have to sleep, I woke up once and saw that half my shit had been captured overnight, literally nothing I could have done.

Keep an eye out for this one, I believe they are making a V2...
Eventually, when they streamline it and/or get some servers which aren't terrible, this will be a fun online game to play with up to 7 friends. For now though, its broken and shit.

What you should be watching this season (Summer 2012 Anime roundup )

I realise this post comes a little late as we're just over half way through the season, but its at this point where you can say for sure you are enjoying a series - in that, if you don't actively want to continue watching it, it probably wasn't any good to begin with...

Not much good showing this season, but here is what you should be watching...

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New Shows:

Binbougami Ga!

About a girl full of luck, and a god of misfortune trying to steal it from her. The show obviously doesnt quite play out like that though, and quickly just turns into a character driven comedy - which probably works out for the better as the characters are all pretty entertaining (a bitch, a god, a masochist dog, a pervert priest, and more as the show goes on).
The show (as can be seen in the picture) is also full of references to other shows, which is usually amazing.

Sword Art Online

aka. Gamers dream.
New MMO comes out, you jack into it matrix style, then the developer turns out to be peter molyneux and he has disabled the quit button. Everyone is trapped in the game, you die in the game, you die in the real world. The only way out is to beat the game.
The anime follows kirito, the black swordsman, who, like your typical tryhard gamer - solo's through the game and becomes overleveled and powerful as fuck. Its a great watch.

Other good shows:

Space brothers - Which you should still be watching from last season.

Yuru Yuri 2 - Sequel, more of the same, if you enjoy schoolgirl comedy you should check out the first season and then watch this as well. Its one of the funnier ones imo.

Almost worth watching tier:

Humanity has declined - bit too boring, confusing and nonsensical

Kokoro Connect - Very watchable, but I'm not sure if id recommend it.

The ambition of Oda Nobuna - Again, very watchable, but not really good enough to recommend. I think a lot of people would find it boring.

Not even worth hyperlinking tier:

Tari Tari, Total Eclipse, Nakaimo, H Dekinai, Arcana Famiglia
All of which are complete trash. Moyashimon 2 probably goes in this tier as well, but I didnt give it more than 1 episode because it bored me so much.

Free to Play steam games (vol 1)

So ive been giving some of these free games on steam a little try, most are so bad that you'd not really want to spend more than an hour or two with them. Heres a quick rundown of what ive tried so far...

Microsoft Flight
Genre: Flight Sim

Well its a flight sim game. You fly planes. Its kind of cool i guess, if you're into that sort of thing, the main problem however is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to do... You take off, you fly, you land - and if im honest none of them are particularly hard to do, ive never tried a flightsim game before but i learned takeoff and landing in about 10 minutes *shrug*.

Verdict: 3/10
Boring game, no difficulty, no killstreaks, no buildings to crash into


World of Battles: Morningstar
Genre: RTS

I'll be honest, i only managed to play this for about 5 minutes before realising its complete garbage and uninstalling it. Company of Heroes is free now, go and play that instead.

Verdict: DNF

Moon Breakers
Genre: Spaceship Action

Looks and plays like a school project, flash buttons on the main menu, only a few choices of ship without buying, only 1 or 2 seem viable at all.
Game itself is dumb and broken, take down the enemy millenium falcon - which felt very similar to every WW2 storm the beach scene (ie. fly directly towards enemy, enemy shoots you down).
I'd like to add also that you can collide with enemy spaceships midspace and nothing happens.

Verdict: 2/10
I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than half an hour.

Realm of the Mad God
Genre: Topdown shooter MMO

Finally something which doesnt completely fucking suck. its a quirky game, unlike anything you've ever played - and to some extent it works. I personally think its a little boring and repetitive, but its fun for a short time, and there is a variety of characters for you to try. its worth trying just to experience it.

Verdict: 6/10
Unique and sort of fun i guess.

Puzzle Pirates
Genre: Puzzle

Yarr, ye get ye installer and ye get ye crew and ye play pirate themed puzzle games that ye already played before on ye 1001 games cartridge for the gameboy mono.
Decent variety of games, and swordfighting is basically a shit version of Super Puzzle Fighter II and was actually sort of fun. It wont be winning any awards but its okay I guess.

Verdict: 6/10
Puzzle compilation ruined by the worst interface ever created.

War Inc. Battlezone
Genre: Online FPS/3PS

Tries to rip off battlefield/CoD, fails due to terrible game mechanics/engine. Guns do not recoil, the presence of third person mode means you have to play third person or you are at a significant disadvantage, guns waver between being way too accurate to being not accurate enough (I shot a guy and got about 7 hit markers yet he doesn't die?).
Terrible HUD, instant pistol switch (wat), classes can carry AR, Shotgun and a pistol (imba), player models can go through walls or can be seen through walls, minimap gives way too much detail (fire and you appear on enemy minimap for a while, including what direction you are facing), movement speeds are awkward.
Weapon system seems kind of cool with the option for loads of attachments, but it ventures into pay to win territory as buying with ingame credits will purchase stuff for 1 or 7 days (and is expensive as fuck)

Verdict: 4/10
Straight up broken, cant use anything other than default weapons because everything is so expensive

Bullet Run
Genre: Online FPS

Another CoD style ripoff, but this one has active skills instead of killstreaks.
I dont actually have that many complaints about this one, but the game is hugely let down by its pay system, you only make enough credits to cover overhead repair costs incurred from killing people, meaning you have to pay real money to be able to purchase anything in the game, and not that i would, but the real money prices are ridiculous as well - the idea is to get people to buy stuff from you, but when you price weapons at around £7 each (with a weapon sight being around £3 as well probably), at some point people are just going to buy CoD4/MW2/BF3 instead.

Verdict: 6/10
Okay FPS completely let down by its GIVE US MONEY structure