Risen

When I first heard about Risen, I was told it was “like Oblivion” – and in the best way – open world.  I spent a lot of time on Oblivion, and before that, Morrowind.

So, Risen, an action RPG by German developers Pirhana Bytes, and published in the UK by Deep Silver.

First impression, I was a bit disappointed I couldn’t create my own character.. that’s something I always really like to do.
Not a big deal though, because let’s face it – once you’ve left the character creation screen you never really see their face again anyways, especially once you’ve found some armour!

So.  I woke up on a beach, shipwrecked.  It’s dark, and the waves are crashing around me.  There’s plenty of junk laying about, and some dead bodies to loot.. and a tutorial character, Sara.  She wusses out as soon as we start exploring and I try to go into a cave where there are some little beasties – and when we find the first house, I’m somewhat relieved to find I get to leave her behind.

Surprisingly, the stray creatures in the world are tougher than I expected.  From what I’ve read, that’s normal in the Gothic games (the previous games by Pirhana Bytes).
I decided I’d rather level up a bit before exploring too far – if one ugly, warty hog creature can be such a problem, then two or more is just suicide. 😉

Two options – go and join The Don, a kind of outlaw – or join the Monastery.  I thought I’d go and check that out first, but as soon as I got near their little camp fire the recruits jumped me, and I was forcibly inducted into the Order.  Oh well.. I didn’t want to be a bad guy.. did I?

Crash Course

I love this new DLC for Left 4 dead.. I was almost starting to feel a bit fed up with the same maps, so this came at a great time for me.

Once downloaded – and that took a while, with everybody else hammering the servers!  I took my time playing it through and examining everything.   I see they’ve sneaked in a few additional comments here and there.. the dead helicopter pilot (shot by Zoey, because he turned!) and new dialogue.. one little exchange in particular shows they all LOVE Steam! 😀

Holed up in the safe room at the start of the second chapter, there’s a whole wall of poetry, and a bunch of comments too.. made me giggle 🙂

Versus mode though – that’s where it’s at!  So far, it looks like the map is heavily in favour of the Infected, for reasonably balanced teams of course.
I don’t know about ridiculously skilled teams – I’m going from personal experience as always – but somehow, despite the whole thing being shorter, there just seems so much more packed into it.

Flash Forward

Interesting and very cool TV show tonight on Five – Flash Forward.

Pretty much – everybody blacks out, but during this time they all get visions of their futures.. and it turns out that they all had visions of the same time and date.
Cue lots of meetings and discussions as to what exactly is going to happen at that time, including the future of the investigation they’re currently undertaking..

I’m not going to hurt my head by thinking about the whole “are they doing this investigation because they saw themselves investigating when they had the flash forward, and if they’d not had the flash forward would they even BE investigating”.. yeah..

Both Tim and I thought it reminded us of Stephen King’s “Cell”, which we both read recently, in which a mobile phone signal is used to turn most of the Earth’s population into mad, flesh-eating zombies.. 😀  Something about the catastrophic outcomes for some of the people, and “no more good days” thing, maybe..

I also love the idea of Suspect Zero, a mysterious guy caught on CCTV, who is unaffected by the blackout!  Bring on the next episode! 🙂

Queuing

Aion has been plagued with long queue times since launch.

On Friday night, when I first tried to start on Aion, I was stopped dead in my tracks by queues of one hour and more, for any server.   Not too much of a surprise; I’d already seen various complaints on forums and from friends on Twitter, and I had other games as backup – for instance, Trials HD on the 360!

I tried again on Saturday morning, and got in with no problems.  So one way to beat long queues is to jump on the game at a quiet time, such as 9am on Saturday morning. 🙂

How else do you beat long queues?  Don’t disconnect.

You have to leave and do real-world things eventually though, right?  Hence the private stores, maintaining active connections for those who wander off variously through the day, but can’t be bothered taking their turn in the queue when they want to come back.  Great for them, but bad for those waiting in the queue, as these stores hog all the space on the servers.

So NCsoft applied an update to try and stop people abusing this feature.   The update limited people to 30 minutes of store-idling, at which point the user is booted, freeing up space on the server for somebody else.  Tweets on Saturday afternoon indicated this hadn’t helped too much though, with queue times still close to an hour.

Two new EU servers were added today.  Was it foolish to expect that maybe I’d be able to get in tonight without too much of a wait?

I guess so!  I went to join, and – three hours and 18 minutes queue time.

There’s no way of migrating your character yet – so nobody with an established character is going to go on the new servers as it would mean starting over.  New people aren’t going to go there if they think they’re going to be empty; most people want to go where other users are.. we’ll see if this gets better over the next few days..

In the meantime, I believe the Left 4 dead DLC hits tomorrow 😀

Shaiya, to level 5..

I was sent a tweet yesterday, telling me to try out Shaiya, a free MMO.

Since this coincided with a competition on Destructoid, I duly signed up an account, and created my character.
Here’s where I started off.. in a field, with a guard and a bunch of spiders and boar type creatures.  The first quest: go and kill some of the spiders.  Once I’d done that, it was go and kill some of the boar things..

Challenging, the game isn’t.  I did set the difficulty to easy, so I could get to level 5 quickly.. but I really didn’t expect to go around swiping creatures with my Wolverine claws, and never have to take a rest or heal myself.   I made level 5 very quickly, though. 🙂

One unavoidable point though.. when running, I am confronted by my avatar’s bottom, wriggling away with every bouncing step.
I’m zoomed out here, but yeah.. somehow, I get the feeling that I’m not the target market for this game. 😉

MMOs

A couple of weeks back, I got into the beta for Aion, a visually impressive MMORPG by NCsoft, set on a divided world with two factions.. oh, and wings!
Getting there took a bit of persuasion and a free key from Eurogamer..  I thought the game would be full of whiny kids and con-artists, and rely on working as part of a team with these.

I used to play another MMO years back, a browser-based real-time strategy game.
To get anywhere in the game, you needed round-the-clock activity and a big alliance, and the bigger the alliance, the more time you had to devote, to the extent that people would phone you to summon you to your computer, literally, at any time of day or night.  In a small, friendly alliance, attacks and defense would be shared, but in the bigger alliances, you were told who to attack, who to defend, and what to build.. you defended other members of the alliance when required, and hoped they would defend you in turn.. so long as there was nobody higher up the food chain, of course. 😉
The bigger alliance also had their ‘personalities’, which you were expected to show loyalty to, no matter how obnoxious… That’s another story though 🙂

So – I was assured that I could play Aion alone if I wished, and join groups as and when.. so I figured I’d give it a go.  The beta went well, and I was surprised to find that the people I did interact with were almost all nice.  Except one.. some twonk followed me down a certain path, letting me take on all the beasties, waiting patiently while I healed between fights.. only to run in and attack the guy I’d fought to get to. >:(

Wasn’t too long to wait for him to re-spawn though.. and  I also really liked flying, when I finally levelled up enough, that is 🙂
I was joined by Tim for a while too:

Aion arrived at work in a pretty, shiny tin on Thursday, but I was only able to actually play yesterday, due to horrific queue times – in excess of one hour on Friday night!
Saturday morning was a bit quieter, and once I was in, that was it..

Play?  I should get paid for this; I spent 10 hours on it!
Still impressed with the graphics, though I was having some problems with slowdowns in busy areas.  I think my computer is nearing time for a reinstall of Windows, too.

So yeah, I left it at level 10, having just gotten my wings.  I’ve not yet met the enemy faction and the PvP which I’m really not sure about yet – I can only try and see, though 🙂

Overnight I’ve been hit with a message on Twitter, suggesting I try out Shaiya by Aeria Games, which is a free and has supposedly excellent PvP.  I’d view that with some suspicion normally, but I also spotted this on Destructoid.  Create an account on Aeria Games with a name starting “Dtoid” and get a character up to level 5 to be in a draw for an Alienware laptop.. so, that’s what I’m doing this evening!

Guitar Hero World Tour

A friend was lucky enough to win Guitar Hero World Tour while at i-37.  However.. he had no Xbox 🙂

We took care of the game and band equipment for a little while.  Lots of fun! 🙂

i37

Multiplay’s i37 was awesome 🙂
Met new people, played loads of games, camped in a wet field, made a few trips to the shops to get ice because the hall was just too hot..

Capped some nice lan treasure.. a crucial pig and a hand-grenade from the last event, thanks to Paw-Fox 🙂

Left 4 dead T-shirt design by a guy called Snakebyte (right)

This time I learned that I don’t actually need energy drinks; I had very little this lan, and needed way less sleep.. and no comedown either.. 😉

Meeting randoms was great – was too shy to do that last lan, but did it this time and loved it.
Strangers have the best candy!

There was a lot of bitching about the noise and vomit.. what I found is that at 6am, all the shouty people are asleep, and the boomers are spent, prolly sleeping it off.. and there are still awesome people around to play with..

Added aircon does not mean the temperature in the hall will be bearable.
Flipflops are essential for the showers, cos you do NOT wanna put your feet on that floor..
Farm Shop is additionally awesome with chocolate+marshmallows!

I won’t be going for i38.. it’s gonna be too cold, and we might be going away for holidays instead.. but roll on i39, even if it is at Newbury again, as rumours have it!