Aion: closed beta journey

 Aion did a step back, it reverted to beta stage due to the change of publisher in Europe and to the migration of their model from subscription to free-to-play. I was never a fan of the new European publisher (GameForge), in fact, i hate every single game they have but that's mostly because of their choice of games,  not their quality of service.

 Anyway... I got my hand on a beta key and I have been playing Aion for 2 day now. So far I can testify the stability of the server, but then again this is a closed beta so the number of players around is only a fraction of what it will be on relaunch, hopefully they will have this covered by then.

 I had however some problems with GameForge's new game launcher. While downloading the game it consistently stopped at 19% annoying the living hell out of me. The error was always the same and prompted me to check my firewall and ISP because it could not access the file for download. Here's a crazy idea, if it was a firewall/ISP problem I wouldn't have the first 19% downloaded now would I? The worst part was that after restarting the download, it had to recheck the integrity of all the files which takes some time, so I just stopped trying.

  Later that day I decided to give it another shot and it no longer gave the error... I guess it wasn't my problem after all *rolleyes*... however, the launcher would occasionally stop downloading from the server and only use torrent connections, meaning it would just sit there uploading with little to no download. So I had to go to the preferences and disable the torrent mode(and restart the launcher... again), everything went fine from that point on.

 About the game itself, little is new for me so far because I played the game back on the original launch, they are going to add some late game content soon with the 3.0 major patch, not sure if it will be implemented with the relaunch but it will be sometime around that date.

 Remember to follow so you can check the next article about my journey into Aion universe.

Read more »

Guild Wars 2: open beta announced!

 Today is the 24th of January 2012, the first day of  year of the Dragon according to Chinese calendar which coincidentally is the mascot of Guild Wars 2, because of this Areanet founder Mike O'Brien took the opportunity to reveal their until now "secret beta plan".

 According to O'Brien they plan to begin spreading beta invitation exclusively to the members of the press starting sometime next month. The invitation will be severely expanded over the course of the next couple of months(March and April) allowing players to finally have a taste of their favorite game.

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

 The launch day is still classified as "TBA"(To be Announced), but with this information some companies such as GameSpy think its is possible to speculate that Guild Wars 2 release date will happen somewhere around June.

Read more »

Anno 2070: A simple guide

 Like the previous Anno titles somethings have not changed, all of them have a steep learning curve and neither of them really give you a good understanding of how things work. This is off putting for most players, specially the younger generation where most of them seem to lack the ability to figure things out for themselves...but i digress...

 Continuing with the topic... when you start a colony a good rule of thumb is to never mix industry with housing nor mixing houses within different factions. Its not because of the pollution nor will they start riots against each other or anything like that which you might have seen in other games, its simply because of space.

A simple city plan

 Houses can only be built near community centers and industry buildings need to be near a storehouse, furthermore different populations have different needs. For example Techs need to be near a Lab while Ecos need to have theater nearby. So if you start mixing things up you will be forcing yourself to add other required buildings within the same area thus reducing your already very limited space.

 One thing you might find helpful if you are low on resources is denying the Ascention Rights in the City Center, all this does is stop houses from automatically upgrading themselves, since upgrading a house costs usually tools and building materials, you may need to allocate them into some industry first specially if you are moving into a fresh island with a single ship and limited resources.

 One thing i found myself curious about was the buildings that have a secondary placement such as a farmhouse. Once you place your farmhouse you are required to build fields around it, the more field you have the better it's efficiency, so the question is "if i put more then the required fields will it get a higher percentage?" It should but that does not happen.

Same plan in city view

 Later in the game when you see that you do not want to expand anymore, some buildings may become useless and others less required. For example in the beginning you will need lots of tools and building materials but once your houses are all set and you are only focusing in building a fleet, it then becomes useless so you can just stop producing all together, lowering your environmental pollution and using that iron for other ventures such as ammunition.

 This was a very basic guide so some people new to this genre know where to begin. This article can be extended to a part 2 depending on the viewers choice, so drop me a line and tell me what you think about this starters guide.

Read more »

Restaurant City

Restaurant City(RC) is a social network game made to play in the browser, all the player needs is a logged in facebook account to connect to the App and start playing.

Read more »