Disquiet Week

Been pretty silent on the blog this week (mainly for one reason below) so I thought I'd post about a few other games I've come across on my travels.

Ultima Forever
Being a big UO fan I was keeping my hopes up for this one, despite the changes to the realm and the simplification of the game. Now it is finally out and guess what? I can't play it. Yep, they decided to not release it for PC instead going for mobile devices. That's nice, except I don't play games on anything BUT PC. Guess I'm the minority now. Oh well - I suppose it was just not meant to be.

Age of Wushu
After my previous write up (featuring castration!) I decided to give the game the benefit of the doubt and downloaded it via a painfully slow link on their website. What's up with that? It's like they don't want people to play. Age of Conan was a bigger download but finished faster? Anyway the first few screens leave a truck load to be desired. Mabinogi has a better login screen, seriously (Mabinogi also recently got guns... and vespas! o_O). On to the game itself and the graphics and animations seem to be pretty good if you can get past all the people flying around (age of wire-fu). The skill system which is much like Mabi where you train them individually would probably work well too.

However I just couldn't get into it. Maybe because the screen is cluttered with names, clunky controls, or maybe because everything is so reading intensive - even skill names and stances are almost small sentences like "Swallow the Whale". It didn't help that latency is an issue as well. One of the tutorial quests is to learn blocking. Basically you tell an NPC you are ready and press right mouse to block. He punched me three times in the face before it registered that yes, I was -actually- blocking already. I'll try it out a bit more sometime to see if it improves but my first impressions aren't good.

Age of Conan
I've occasionally been posting about this and it seems I've run into the forseen lack of content (solo content anyway) to do at higher levels. Not really a bad thing since it IS an MMORPG after all, but being a loner on a free pvp world does make it a bit more challenging to do group content. They don't joke around about group content either. One of the early ones past Tortage is to defeat a Cock Handler (as in chickens and roosters you gutter minded people). He's only around the mid level 20's. I still can't beat him with my level 51, which is where I think I'll leave my "test"(?) character for now. Should be interesting to see if I get a free level 50 in a few months.

Card Hunter
Tobold has been championing this browser based, tactical game of nostalgia for awhile now. Sorry to say it's not really my cup of tea, but hey it works and it's free. Just don't expect XCOM quality stuff from it, nor any meaningful story to tie all your battles together.

Oh no. A 2 dimensional dragon.

Meanwhile, back at the Queen's Gauntlet in Guildwars 2... "DAMN YOU LIADRI!!!!!" >.<

Game of Trolls?

Age of Wushu has been in the blogosphere news as of late due to a new evil faction called the "Rootless Clan" and their interesting mechanic being introduced to the game. To join them you basically need to have your virtual junk lopped off. "That's no problem," I hear you say "I just won't join them and keep my epeen where it belongs". Well there's the kicker. Members of that group get a daily quest to gang up and slice and dice non-members (of the high level variety) in a pop-up tent, and then offer them membership. In short a band of high level dickless bastards go on a rampage to make more dickless bastards to go on a rampage.

Possibly their leader.

A quick look at the game wiki also shows they already have a handy-dandy kidnapping system too for all wannabe kidnappers out there. You see when you log out of the game, your character is still in the world as an NPC doing some menial task like spruiking a shop or sweeping a street. Low levels are particularly susceptible to then being knocked out by a wiley player, stuffed in a bag, and sold on the black market for some coin. As for the victim? Well when they next log in they wake up with a bad case of "morning after" slave debuff (presumably after being made some sort of toy the whole time) which goes away after... ohh, around 6 hours of real time.

Now I can't actually say this is a fair review to the game since I've not even played it. Indeed, I've even had some of my guild suggest it is awesome and I should try it out however "features" like the above just rub me the wrong way. Who knows, maybe the next thing they add is the "rapist" faction which needs no elaboration. Guess there are fates worse than permadeath huh? :P