I've really been digging the demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the PS3. After years of playing first person shooters on PC, I honestly thought that I'd never really get the hang of playing them using dual analogue on a console, but I'm actually pretty good! I'm consistently in the top three or four people on my team in the demo, although my kill to death ration isn't that flash.
Overall, the demo just "feels" good. The controls are intuitive, the visual and aural feedback is great, and it's so satisfying when you're part of a decent team and you can pull out a win. Although, even on the occasions that my team has lost I've still had a lot of fun. The medals and rewards are fun also, and it's tantalising seeing all of the unlocks that will be available in the full game.
I'm definitely planning on getting the full version of this game, but that just means I've added it to a long list of games that I want to buy. They are as follows:
- Brutal Legend
- Heavy Rain
- Mass Effect 2
- Bioshock 2
- Assassin's Creed 2
- Bayonetta
- Stalker: Call Of Pripyat
- Metro 2033
I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of them now. The problem is that I just don't have the money! My fiance and I are in the middle of applying for mortgage so that we can start looking for a house. We're hoping to find somewhere within the next few months, so that we can be settled in before we get married in January next year. Most of our spare cash has been going into the house deposit, and I really don't think I'd be very popular if I spent cash on new games.
Oh well, it's times like these that give me a good excuse to finish games that I'm already playing. I've been getting back into Grand Theft Auto IV, and I think I'm only about a dozen missions away from finishing the main storyline. As long as I make it, this would be the only GTA game that I have successfully completed! I've always tended to just get tied up in the side missions in the previous games and end up losing interest after a while.
I'm also still working on Resistance: Fall Of Man, and I've got Resistance 2 waiting in the wings also because I bought both of them as a bundle online for cheap.
So, I can't really complain. It's not like I don't have any games to play. I just don't have any new games to play.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
My greatest moment in gaming
I've been really busy lately, so I haven't had time to play many games. I'm still training for my half marathon, and I've found that on the long runs my mind quite often wanders to gaming. I got to pondering about games that have actually made me verbalise at the screen while I'm playing, either in anger or joy, and this took me down memory lane to what I would say is my greatest moment in gaming. I'm sure everyone has that one moment that just stands out in their gaming life. I experienced mine while playing EverQuest...
It was around nine or so years ago, and EverQuest was pretty much the only game that I played at the time. It occupied my life for about two years. I think I mentioned in an earlier article just how addicted I was to this game. By the time I experienced my greatest moment, I had been playing the game for about a good seven or eight months. My main character at the time was a High Elf Wizard by the name of Zoidberg Zaius.
That's a screenshot of him above, showing off and casting a spell, and he's also wielding the staff that played a part in my greatest moment. It's called "The Staff Of The Wheel", and the only way to get it is as a result of a quest called Tarton's Wheel. You have to collect ten "rods" from around the world of Norrath. A few of them are relatively easy, some are quite tricky and you need a group to help you get them, and some are really quite hard. I worked on the quest off and on for a few months, getting help where I could from helpful groups and my guildmates ( "The Ancients Of The Realm" ), and when I couldn't get any help I would just try it myself. This led me to venture by myself, naked, into the heart of Lower Guk...
Now, before I go any further I feel I should explain something about old school EverQuest. At the time that I was doing this quest, if you died you would be resurrected without any of your equipment at the nearest town that you bound yourself to, along with losing a hefty chunk of the experience that you had gained ( which would sometimes take many hours to gain back ) and you would then have to go on the dreaded "corpse run" to find your corpse and get all of your gear back All you folks out there who got their introduction to MMORPGs with WOW don't know how easy you have it. EverQuest was hard. It could sometimes be an incredibly punishing and soul destroying game. It pretty much invented "grinding", and yet that addictive grind kept me coming back for more. Okay, back to the story...
So, the reason I had to venture down to Lower Guk - the lair of undead Frogloks and various other nasty creatures - was so I could get the very last rod for this quest. It was located on the floor of a room occupied by this guy:
Yes, "A Reanimated Hand". Note the fancy ring he's wearing, though. At least he's a stylish reanimated hand. As I mentioned earlier, I ventured into Lower Guk without any of my gear just in case things went horribly wrong and I died down there. Doing a corpse run down there by myself would have been impossible, basically. The only other option would have been trying to get someone to drag my corpse to the entrance, but that was always a long shot as to whether or not you could find someone to do it. So, I zoned into Lower Guk, all shivering and frightened, and began sending out zone wide calls for someone to cast Invisibility Versus Undead on me. As a Wizard, I had the standard Invisibility spell, but undead mobs see right through this. As nearly all of the mobs down in Lower Guk were undead, the only thing that could help was IvU. Luckily, a friendly Paladin near the zone entrance kindly cast the spell on me, after which I began to timidly make my way to the Reanimated Hand's lair...
Another thing about old school EverQuest ( I keep saying old school because they eventually did bring in some additional features which made the game ever so slightly more easy, such as your corpse appearing in a celestial graveyard up on the moon of Luclin after it had been left rotting for a week or so which meant you could then recover it from there instead of having to attempt an impossible corpse run ) was that that it didn't have a map. That's right, no handy little map in the upper right corner of the screen that points you in the direction of your next quest item. No, you had to do it the hard way, which for me meant printing out dozens and dozens of maps of all of the zones in Norrath. I had printed out a Lower Guk map before attempting this kamikaze mission to get the rod, so I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. Although it was such a long time ago that I did this, I can still clearly remember every little moment. My heart was pounding the entire time. Every time I came across a mob, I would hold my breath just in case it was one of rare ones who weren't undead down there and would see through my IvU spell. There was also the fear of the Invisibility vs Undead spell just dropping for no reason. This actually happened with some spells, they had a maximum time they could last but sometimes they would just drop off early. Luckily, I made to the base of the Hand's lair without being noticed.
To get up to the Hand, you had to jump into the base of a waterfall and then swim up it to get to the top where the Hand is waiting. Weird, I know, but that's how it was. I dove in and successfully swam to the top. I emerged into his domain, and my Invisibility vs Undead spell promptly disappeared. Honestly, I totally began shitting myself. The hand started hammering away at me, along with a Dar Knight who hangs around in the room also. I had buffed myself up as much as possible before starting the adventure, and the friendly Paladin had also cast some buffs on me along with the Invis spell, but my hit points were rapidly disappearing. I was frantically searching the floor for the rod, but it was almost the same colour as the floor so it was really hard to see. Finally I located it, quickly clicked on it to pick it up, and then cast my Gate spell to take me back to my bind point in the town of Freeport. I didn't have much hope that it would work, because with both of the mobs hitting me there was a high chance that they would interrupt my casting and then I'd be screwed. The few seconds it took to cast the spell seemed to take forever, but amazingly my casting wasn't interrupted and next thing I knew I was back in Freeport! My hit points were almost down to zero, but I had made it! Going back to what I said about games that make you verbalise at the screen, this was definitely a moment where I stood up and was whooping and yelling with joy. It was such an adrenaline buzz.
After this, I made my way up to Everfrost Peaks and handed in my rods to the quest giver. This in itself was quite terrifying, because the quest givers in EverQuest were notorious for just swallowing your quest items for no apparent reason and you got nothing in return. Once again I held my breath when I clicked "Combine" on the quest bag I had been given, but everything worked as it should and I was left with this:
This, undoubtedly, is my greatest moment in gaming. The sense of satisfaction from completing this quest was just incredible, especially soloing The Reanimated Hand rod.
So, how about all of you out there? What would you say your greatest moment has been
It was around nine or so years ago, and EverQuest was pretty much the only game that I played at the time. It occupied my life for about two years. I think I mentioned in an earlier article just how addicted I was to this game. By the time I experienced my greatest moment, I had been playing the game for about a good seven or eight months. My main character at the time was a High Elf Wizard by the name of Zoidberg Zaius.
That's a screenshot of him above, showing off and casting a spell, and he's also wielding the staff that played a part in my greatest moment. It's called "The Staff Of The Wheel", and the only way to get it is as a result of a quest called Tarton's Wheel. You have to collect ten "rods" from around the world of Norrath. A few of them are relatively easy, some are quite tricky and you need a group to help you get them, and some are really quite hard. I worked on the quest off and on for a few months, getting help where I could from helpful groups and my guildmates ( "The Ancients Of The Realm" ), and when I couldn't get any help I would just try it myself. This led me to venture by myself, naked, into the heart of Lower Guk...
Now, before I go any further I feel I should explain something about old school EverQuest. At the time that I was doing this quest, if you died you would be resurrected without any of your equipment at the nearest town that you bound yourself to, along with losing a hefty chunk of the experience that you had gained ( which would sometimes take many hours to gain back ) and you would then have to go on the dreaded "corpse run" to find your corpse and get all of your gear back All you folks out there who got their introduction to MMORPGs with WOW don't know how easy you have it. EverQuest was hard. It could sometimes be an incredibly punishing and soul destroying game. It pretty much invented "grinding", and yet that addictive grind kept me coming back for more. Okay, back to the story...
So, the reason I had to venture down to Lower Guk - the lair of undead Frogloks and various other nasty creatures - was so I could get the very last rod for this quest. It was located on the floor of a room occupied by this guy:
Yes, "A Reanimated Hand". Note the fancy ring he's wearing, though. At least he's a stylish reanimated hand. As I mentioned earlier, I ventured into Lower Guk without any of my gear just in case things went horribly wrong and I died down there. Doing a corpse run down there by myself would have been impossible, basically. The only other option would have been trying to get someone to drag my corpse to the entrance, but that was always a long shot as to whether or not you could find someone to do it. So, I zoned into Lower Guk, all shivering and frightened, and began sending out zone wide calls for someone to cast Invisibility Versus Undead on me. As a Wizard, I had the standard Invisibility spell, but undead mobs see right through this. As nearly all of the mobs down in Lower Guk were undead, the only thing that could help was IvU. Luckily, a friendly Paladin near the zone entrance kindly cast the spell on me, after which I began to timidly make my way to the Reanimated Hand's lair...
Another thing about old school EverQuest ( I keep saying old school because they eventually did bring in some additional features which made the game ever so slightly more easy, such as your corpse appearing in a celestial graveyard up on the moon of Luclin after it had been left rotting for a week or so which meant you could then recover it from there instead of having to attempt an impossible corpse run ) was that that it didn't have a map. That's right, no handy little map in the upper right corner of the screen that points you in the direction of your next quest item. No, you had to do it the hard way, which for me meant printing out dozens and dozens of maps of all of the zones in Norrath. I had printed out a Lower Guk map before attempting this kamikaze mission to get the rod, so I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. Although it was such a long time ago that I did this, I can still clearly remember every little moment. My heart was pounding the entire time. Every time I came across a mob, I would hold my breath just in case it was one of rare ones who weren't undead down there and would see through my IvU spell. There was also the fear of the Invisibility vs Undead spell just dropping for no reason. This actually happened with some spells, they had a maximum time they could last but sometimes they would just drop off early. Luckily, I made to the base of the Hand's lair without being noticed.
To get up to the Hand, you had to jump into the base of a waterfall and then swim up it to get to the top where the Hand is waiting. Weird, I know, but that's how it was. I dove in and successfully swam to the top. I emerged into his domain, and my Invisibility vs Undead spell promptly disappeared. Honestly, I totally began shitting myself. The hand started hammering away at me, along with a Dar Knight who hangs around in the room also. I had buffed myself up as much as possible before starting the adventure, and the friendly Paladin had also cast some buffs on me along with the Invis spell, but my hit points were rapidly disappearing. I was frantically searching the floor for the rod, but it was almost the same colour as the floor so it was really hard to see. Finally I located it, quickly clicked on it to pick it up, and then cast my Gate spell to take me back to my bind point in the town of Freeport. I didn't have much hope that it would work, because with both of the mobs hitting me there was a high chance that they would interrupt my casting and then I'd be screwed. The few seconds it took to cast the spell seemed to take forever, but amazingly my casting wasn't interrupted and next thing I knew I was back in Freeport! My hit points were almost down to zero, but I had made it! Going back to what I said about games that make you verbalise at the screen, this was definitely a moment where I stood up and was whooping and yelling with joy. It was such an adrenaline buzz.
After this, I made my way up to Everfrost Peaks and handed in my rods to the quest giver. This in itself was quite terrifying, because the quest givers in EverQuest were notorious for just swallowing your quest items for no apparent reason and you got nothing in return. Once again I held my breath when I clicked "Combine" on the quest bag I had been given, but everything worked as it should and I was left with this:
This, undoubtedly, is my greatest moment in gaming. The sense of satisfaction from completing this quest was just incredible, especially soloing The Reanimated Hand rod.
So, how about all of you out there? What would you say your greatest moment has been
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