Steam and the Great Gift Pile

This year Steam has granted us with more Christmas discounts but this time they added a little "fetch the achievement" game.  Every day Steam selects six achievement that range from "open your inventory" to doing some in-game achievement. Once completed you are awarded with a gift or a lump of coal. You can trade 7 lumps of coal for a gift which is either full game or a coupon, games and golden coupons can be used immediately while regular coupons like the lumps of coal must wait until the event ends. Honestly i don't see the purpose of the coupons, so far i have gained 3 of them and the discount they give is smaller than the ones Steam...

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Aion is going Free-To-Play!

  After 2 years in the European and North American market(3 years since the Asian release) with a subscription model, it is now going to use a mix of both free-to-play and subscription.   There will be 3 payment models now: Starter: this one is the most basic with limited amount of character slots, chat, trading. Veteran: basic for old players and upgradable for Starter players, they can play the regular game with no limitations. Gold: this is the subscription model which gives significantly lower instance cooldowns, several xp and reward bonus.   This also brings a bigger change, NCsoft will no longer publish Aion in Europe...

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Guild Wars 2: Engineer overview

  The Engineer is an uncommon profession in a fantasy MMO mainly because it is a technological class and since most fantasy games are centered in medieval times there isn't much room for guns and explosions. Weapons   Of all professions the Engineer is the one with the least weapons and the only one with a single weapon set. The Rifle and the double Pistol can be used to a good extent in long and close range as both have a immobilization skill however i am going to give the advantage to the Rifle because Jump Shot is an incredibly adaptable skill and i will explain why. Basically this skill will make you leap forward while doing...

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Guild Wars2: new class revealed!

  After nine long months of waiting ArenaNet finally decided it was time to show us the eighth and final profession available in Guild Wars 2: the Mesmer, which honestly was not a surprise to anyone as they already had announced it was a known magical class so by process of elimination it had to be it. So what can we expect from the Mesmer profession you ask? Illusions & Shatter   The Mesmer main class mechanic is their ability to summon illusions(Clones or Phantasms) which take form of several(up to 3) uncontrolled NPCs that look like the caster and the ability to Shatter them on command applying several effects on nearby...

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War Inc Battlezone

  Couple of days ago i saw an advertisement for a game called War Inc, at first i dismissed it simply because i have little faith in free games... however after i saw some gameplay footage in youtube i thought i should give it a go, in the end i am glad i did as it is indeed a interesting game.   Registration is straight forward and very quick after which you are prompted to create a character and spend your first stat point, this is one of the key aspect that i find interesting in the game as you have several unique stats that help you enhance your gameplay according to how you like to play. There is a great number of ways to customize...

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The Life-cycle of online games

 Some players seem to forget that the gaming industry is a business run by game companies funded by money investors who do not give a damn about the players, so it is always about the money and therefore is run as a business. Online games are a two part product, one being the actual game box called the "traffic generator" because it is what leads people into spending money and the second part which is the the "margin generator", in this case we are talking about the in-game shop or the monthly subscription. In most cases the "traffic generator" is made cheaper in order to attract clients thus having a lower contribution margin, the...

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why most new games fail while Counter-Strike is still so popular

  The first time i played Counter-Strike i was in high-school and the game was still a unofficial Half-Life modification, at that time it was closer to a quake-like game with modern weapons then what it is now, but i will leave that for another topic. History   For those that don't know what Counter-Strike is, it's a First Person Shooter developed by a fellow player made from a game called Half-life that is why it was a "modification",  i use the past tense because once Valve saw the amount of people playing it, they bought the rights to the game and thus it became an official mod soon after and it became a stand-alone game later...

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Guild Wars 2: Ranger pets receiving some love!

  Every Guild Wars fan or at least one that likes to watch videos, knows how the Ranger class has been among the weakest in the game, this is due to its special mechanic is the "pet system" because quite honestly its just bad from the AI to its utility, so bad in fact its probably the least played profession and the hardest to find videos of and its common for most rangers to just ignore/forget they even have a pet.   The truth is the pet being the Class mechanic means it has a major role in the overall output of the profession and AreaNet knows this so they started to give it the love they have been promising for a while. Pet...

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How to increase your wireless signal!

After waiting 27 long suffering days without internet at home, they finally managed to come and install the damn fiber optics with some good/bad news, the first is that they called asking if they could come 8 days a head of schedule... yay! Second bit is both good news is that even though i have contacted 30mb download and 5mb upload speed, i can get up to 2x the download and 4x upload if i am connected via Ethernet unfortunately there is a bit of bad news there as well, the router is in the kitchen and the PC is in the bedroom so i have to use wireless which only gaves me about 1/3 download and 2x upload. Which leads me to the main topic,...

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Why i love Samsung!

I have been playing in a Samsung T220 for the last 3 years and it has been a pleasure, great image quality, great aesthetic and the support at least where i live is fast and effective. Over the course of 3 years i only had to send it for repairs once and not only did they came to pick it up on the very next day they also gave me replacement monitor until i got mine back(about a week after) which was fast anyway. This week my monitor started displaying some blueish tone on the dark colors, meaning something was starting to fail and i went to check how long i had on my warranty which sadly had expire couple of days ago, it was a chock because...

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ISP frustration!

I'm so pissed at my ISP and i'm going to tell you why. I have internet connection at home since the 4th of October so the only net i get is from public places, on October 6 i made contract with a ISP and they said it would take 15 days(yeah that's right) for them to install the fiber optics in my apartment... fine at least i'll have a awesome stable internet connection. After 15 miserable days i was so looking forward to having internet again and... they didn't show up and i got no calls from their IT department, on the next they i called them and they said something was not right (duuhh) so they asked their IT department to call me when...

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Orcs Must Die: Review

I have been playing this single-player game named "Orcs Must Die!", well for starts the title is catchy but it doesn't stop there as the main plot is ridiculous has well. You start as a young misbehaved student that is forced to defend the masters fortress who after countless years of slaying orcs, slips in a blood stain and hits his head thus dying in a ridiculous fashion. To defend the castle you must protect the Rift from waves of feeble-minded orcs. Now this is the interesting part, you can either kill the orcs by shooting them with a crossbow, slashing them with a sword, blowing them with explosive barrels or arrange a set traps to do...

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Internet and our life

I have not been online for a long time... ok it was been a little over a week but for a gamer like me it's a life-time, once we get used to the concept of having all the information on the web and online-friends at our fingertips and suddenly lose that connection its like going back to the dark ages, our real life daily routine starts to weight more on our shoulders. Each person has its own reasons for being online doesn't matter if you are in the gaming community or not, whether you like to search/download new music, learn some new trait, reading world news or just login to your game of choice and play to gain a ego-boost, kill time, to be...

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Bastion

I recently found a little game called Bastion from a indie company named SuperGiant Games, it's a single-player action RPG that tells the story of a white-haired kid who survives a cataclysmic event called the Calamity. The story continues as the kid tries to make the best of the situation in this floating magical world, eventually reaching the Bastion an emergency location where people are supposed to meet and rebuild and it goes on from there... One interesting and unique feature of this game is the way the story is told, it doesn't have the typical text-quests or cut-scenes instead there is a narrator that provides a fluid yet constant...

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What is ArcheAge? (part 2)

Previous article: What is the Labor system and how Gathering & Crafting works Last time we talked about how the Labor System combined with Gathering and Crafting, now we are going to take a glimpse at how Construction works in ArcheAge works as it is one of the most anticipated features in the game and the one one of the first things that was shown as the game was reviled to the community. In ArcheAge is it possible to construct so many things, from several types of buildings to your own personal ship for naval warfare, this is the first feature i saw in this game several years ago that opened my eyes to the possibilities that it will...

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What is ArcheAge? (part 1)

The first time i read about ArcheAge i was intrigued because i never heard of it before however, it had such amazing unique features that i never saw in any other mmo, it simply blew my mind how an unknown company could come out with such high quality game. The reasons why its not that well known in the gaming community its because it's being developed by a Korean company(XLGames) and the lack of marketing, which might be a good thing because since the game isn't ready yet and they should use their funds for development instead. ArcheAge is a Sand-Box MMO, a game that where the world evolves by the players hands by changing and interacting...

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New Design!

Hey guys, i have been doing some changes to the blog over the past 24h and this was the final result, i really enjoy how it turned how and need a lot of tweaking to get it work properly but it was worth it. The main reason for the changes are apart from the obvious awesome look, its now much more organized as you can browse the posts by their category and the search will now automatically search and show what you are looking for within this website. Hope you enjoy it as much as i ...

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Global Agenda: Recursive Colony

  Recursive Colony is the first large expansion of the third person shooter Global Agenda since it became free to play. The theme of this expansion is an invasion of a horde of self-replicating robots that is menacing the player Domes them selves, so it is up to you to stop it reclaim peace within the Domes once again.    From what i see it adds some new content both for PvE and PvP, some much requested features like the ability to select a new character without disconnecting and some other main features such as: New Open Zone with several instanced missions, quest chains, mid-high level content, and social spaces New enemies...

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Star Wars: TOR, The Alderaan Warzone

  The Alderaan warzone - like the name implies is a pvp instanced area, just like in any other MMO but it has a BioWare touch to it, by that i mean that like other of their games it has a more theatrical feeling to it but with the help from the team from Warhammer Online it still feels like a competitive pvp match.   On to explaining why... the players start the match in a one of two large dropships one for the Republic and one for the Empire,  the objective is to secure the map by taking control of its defenses which are some cannons that are spread around the map which will fire upon the enemy dropship thus eventually destroying...

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Micro-transaction games growing stronger!

  A multiplayer online games market data that tracks both PC massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and multiplayer online games (MOGs) that have a charged service this includes subscription and micro-transaction payments, has revealed that the subscription sector has suffered a heavy decline in 2010 while the micro-transaction type grew ever strongly.   With this information  IHS Screen Digest expects the MMOG/MOG segment to grow from $2.7 billion in 2010 to $3.1 billion by 2015 due to the growth driven by microtransaction-based services in both the MMOG and MOG sub-segments. Read the full article Here.  ...

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Dead Island

 If i could put the game into a small sentence it would be "a world with quests like Fallout 3 with the weapon customization of Dead Rising combined with the first person feel and co-op of Left 4 Dead", however this would not be fair as the game brings many other things that makes it entertaining. You start your journey with a cut-scene of this huge party in a tropical resort and end up drunk in your hotel bed without a clue that a huge zombie outbreak as set it self in the island, as you go on you will find survivors all around the island that require your assistance to get anything from food and water to parts to help fixing cars. The...

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Guild Wars 2: skill bar

 We all know that GW2 is an action-type mmo and one of the aspect that was influenced was the skill bar, so today i am going to explain in detail how the it works as it is quite distinct from other games of the same genre.  As we can see in the image above there a total of 10 skill slots divided in two types, basically the first 5 on the left are based on what weapon you currently have equipped and the last 5 are entirely up to the player, each of this two types is sub-divided into some specific skill types Weapon skills  This five slots are directly linked to your class and weapon type, meaning a ranger and a warrior with...

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The Secret World

  Many might not know this title but it has some strong roots, The Secret World is a new upcoming MMO from the creator of Age of Conan and The Longest Journey. It's purpose is to be distinct from your typical game as its neither futuristic nor it is the usual fantasy type, it in fact takes place in today's modern times but with a slight twist of the occult or has game Director Ragnar Tornquist describes it, "a world of contemporary dark fantasy". In The Secret World the way players are introduced into the world is unique, you don't start in some remote location killing a few animals for some copper in fact you start the game as a...

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What is "skill" in the gamers world?

I think most players have of been perverting the idea of "skill" to the point that now it is completely misinterpreted, the true meaning of "skill" is knowing how/when to do a certain action and will it influence the battle in order to achieve the desired outcome(victory). Most players have forgotten how small action have a big impact in the gameplay and that shows skill, things such as: knowing that you should run out of Range/Line-Of-Sight. recognizing when to destroy an object so your target can not use it to break LOS. knowing that a particular route can be used to attack/flee. correctly place a ground effect such as a firewall in...

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Guild Wars 2 PvP (Part 1): Let us go to War

  Today I want to talk about a very important aspect of the game, the PvP of Guild War 2. I believe in competitiveness and the ability to provide a wide array of choices for groups or single players to be ingredients for a healthy and lasting PvP community in a game. Now I'm going to list the PvP formats we know so far: Hot Join   "Hot Join" are games aimed for the casual side of structured PvP. From 1v1 and up to 10v10 matches, players can join any open map at any time, as much as to experiment new builds, or wanting a few quick exciting matches to get out of the PvE environment. The Hot Join has a mechanic that on a lost match,...

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Guild Wars 2: a worthy successor to 2011 mmos

Today I want to talk about combat, there are many things worth mentioning about this game and I'll probably spread this for future posts, yet the reason I chose this topic is because I feel that it is one of the most important aspects of the game. - Cross-class combo's, imagine a Elementarist setting a wall of fire and if someone shoots through it, the projectiles become imbued with the fire attribute dealing extra damage, or a guardian setting a healing circle on the ground and shooting through it will heal the allies in the vicinity of the enemy it hits. These are only a small example of the many combinations there will be in the game, sounds like fun? It sure does to me! - Dynamic skill system, no longer are we restricted to combat skills only when there is a target present as...

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Eve online: Investment gone wrong

  It comes as a surprise to me that the news aren't about gold selling anymore... eight months ago, two players named Eddie and Mordor began to establish a reputation for themselves as online brokers. In reality, however, it was just the two of them taking in people’s money(aka ISK in-game) and giving back 5% every week as rewards from their "investment".   Week after week the business snowballed, but not as the money raked in but players who didn't know they were throwing away their money in the guise of investments for the future. In short order, they had as many as 300 new investors each week. All throwing their ISKs at the pair...

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Free to play MMOs a new trend?

  In the past couple of years we have seen a lot of MMORPGs going from P2P(pay to play) to F2P(free to play) mainly due to subscription decline as a way to regain some players while maintaining profit from the online shops.     Most of this games were not made from unknown indy companies but from well established IPs and we are going to briefly talk about each one of them.   Dungeons and Dragons Online launched on February 28, 2006 and remained a p2p MMORPG with a $14.99 monthly fee up until September 9, 2009. Since going free to play Dungeons and Dragons Online has more players than ever. Plus, the game’s publisher("Turbin")...

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Tera: Political system

  For those who don't know Tera is one of the next-generation games of the MMO genre, or should i say action-MMORPG. It's most known features are the targeting, combat and political system, to keep this post small i will only talk about its political system.   In Tera players can rise to fame through PvP, epic quests and via the popular vote to become 1 of 18 Vanarchs, these players are the rulers of their designated region and have the unique power to change the rules within their domain, such as changing the taxes, forbid(or not) world-pvp, opening new shops, make player-made events, change the spawn time of the mobs and...

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Guild Wars 2: Sylvari redesign

  It seems that the designers were not pleased with the initial look of the Sylvari race, apparently they looked too much like the typical elfs which are humanoids that embrace nature(tree-huggers?) and not the intended "beautiful  plants", so they started to redesign it to make it more like a humanoid plant and this was the result:   Personally when i choose a race for my character i look at their animation and how cool the armor looks on them, i can't see their animation until it is shown in GamesCom but their armor seems to be entirely made out of plants as well which for me is a major turnoff, specially in a game were the...

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World of Warcraft sustaining heavy casualties!

  We are on the second quarter of 2011 and it has been confirmed that Blizzard has lost over 300,000 World of Warcraft subscribers, adding to the losses in the first quarter it mounts up to 600,000+ subscribers that stopped playing in this year alone. As a result of the decline the developers are forced to find out other ways to please their faithful customers by other means other "adding random content". "As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content..." - Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime   Yes either that or Blizzard has...

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Diablo 3: No Mods & No Offline...wut?

  Diablo 1 and 2 was part of my teen life, it brings back fond memories whenever I think back on the fun (and slightly masochist) times I spent with my friends in Hard Mode... now knowing that Blizzard forbids mods for a interface like Diablo 3 doesn't sway me much one way or another, the classic Diablo interface was never in much need for re-arrangings. And it’s no surprise they don’t want you modding the online game: it would rather undermine the item market.   However it is a shame to know that there will not be a offline mode for Diablo 3, I very much enjoyed that aspect on the previous versions and considering how Starcraft...

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SW:TOR - (Raid Loot) trend for the future?

  It's come to my attention that Star Wars is on test phase regarding a new way to sort through loot drop from Operations(raids) in game, now any mmo gamer worth their salt should have experienced at least some of the few classic raid loot dramas, DKP system? Ninja looted? Well if this new system works out we can say goodbye to them and some more! Loot containers' (name is still a work in progress!) do indeed exist and are designed to alleviate the frustration some feel around high-level loot drops. As it's currently implemented, at the end of a key encounter within an Operation, upon looting a high-level opponent, everyone in the...

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Diablo 3: Auction House

Just saw the announcement of the Auction House system that Blizzard is going to implement in the 3rd sequel of the Diablo series, it seems that players will be able to sell picked-up items in the AH for REAL MONEY, that's right it will be similar to a cash-shop, the only difference is that you can only buy items that dropped for someone else contrary to the cash-shops where the company creates the item for you. So how will it work? Its Simple you play the game as you have always done until some nice item drops, then you must make a decision... will you equip the item(and probably bind it to your character) or will you sell it... if you...

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