Hello there!
Despite evidence to the contrary, I'm not dead, merely burned out somewhat. It creeps up on you. There will be months, doing this kind of thing, when you think you can go on doing whatever it is youre doing, forever! I always thought so. And then there will be months when distractions distract and enthusiasms wane. There will also be months when Real Life schedules change and time becomes the pressing factor. Perhaps these are merely excuses in my own case, and that I'm just fundamentally lazy, but for whatever reason, I seem to have become a podcaster rather than a blogger, and with us up to two shows a week, I really do wonder what else there is for me to say about this stuff, in writing.
Anyway, I'm now shutting up shop here after a lengthy and enjoyable run, and invite you instead to set the browser controls and bookmarks to the new and improved:
Where you can of course find the most up-to-date podcast episodes, hot off the editing software, along with all sorts of other stuff which we've yet to fully figure out or implement. My writers block is unlikely to last forever, and when I do start rambling in written form again, I'll be doing so over there anyway, in addition to Producer Jon's own blog posting, which can be found there too.
So it isn't "farewell", but "see you on the otherside!"
Tim
Edit: Commenting is now closed. Nothing but spammers and tumbleweeds left here now anyway. We've got a forum at the above url, so do say hello there instead!
author: Van Hemlock | posted @ Tuesday, October 13, 2009 1:19 PM |
As mentioned last show, after an unexpected turn of events, I somehow found myself playing an extra MMO amid my already packed schedule, so here is a bonus Op Cheapseats reviewlet for a strange and quirky little bit of online fun; Pirate Galaxy, which can be found here:
http://pirate-galaxy.gamigo.com/
It's a browser-based game, so negligible download, and is Free 2 Play, in the no-sub, item-shop sense of the term.
In the distant future, mankind has been driven to the brink and near extinction by the evil Mantis empire. Reduced to the status of
guerrilla fighters, rebels and pirates, the remainder of humanity now fights a hit and run war on the worlds of the Mantis, using
atmospheric capable star fighters to weave through enemy lines and hit strategic objectives hard. The battle to reclaim the heritage of mankind starts on the remote world of Vega 2, where you arrive in a modified transport with a pair of blasters and a thirst for revenge.
Three Good Things:
- Novel
Despite being about spaceships, the actual gameplay takes place on the surfaces of canyon-based planets. The ship hovers a fixed distance above the floor and can't climb canyon walls, despite being orbit-capable under its own power. Functionally then, the player is more in the nature of a tank or hovercraft than spaceship, scootering about the planet maps carrying out the missions. Saying all that, the basic gameplay is a lot of fun, being sufficiently light and carefree to complement the more serious MMO as a good drop-in, fifteen minute sort of thing.
- Slick
The audio and visuals are very well done, particularly the space-based travel/lobby/shop sections, with music and camera-work that comes together well to create a stirring sense of purpose to it all. The art is somewhat cartoony in style, rather than the stark elegance of something like EVE Online, but works well with the overall theme. Ship paint schemes are extensively featured and while the various ship models used seemed broadly quite similar, the planetscapes I've seen so far are surprisingly different and interesting.
- Unlocks
As befits a renegade army on the run, the equipment upgrades must first be taken from the enemy, in the form of blueprint unlocks, before the hangar robots can sell you one to equip. Although these can be found by accident, the necessary blueprint unlocks are also the focus of many of the side missions on offer. I quite like the sense of steadily increasing potency this brings, and non-essential blueprints, like ship paint designs can be found as drops as well. Similarly, travel routes to other worlds must first be probed for, forming a similar unlocking mechanic to the galaxy map, and again, the completionist in me enjoys seeing the unknown gradually revealed bit at a time.
Three Bad Things:
- Ammo
The ships have no autoattack, and the various hotkeys cost harvestable Energy spheres to use. This is especially noticeable with the 'Gun' hotkey; there is no autoattack, and the blasters cost an increasing amount of energy per shot, as you equip more powerful upgrades. This all means that the time you're onto the Vega 1/Lyris stuff, you'll likely be spending nearly as much time harvesting Energy as fighting stuff, as you stock up ahead of fights. Running out of Energy mid-combat leaves you able only to flee if you can, and even the Afterburner needs Energy to use. Gamigo understand that this is a problem and would like to help you, by giving you the opportunity to buy big stacks of Energy, Crystal and more, for real money, in the item shop! Oh I know, they've got to earn their money somehow, and I personally don't mind the downtime that harvesting enforces, but this will annoy many, I suspect.
- Classes
The Vega 3 starbase has a variety of ship types for sale, which based on their available slots correspond roughly to tank, healer, debuff and damage dealer. All very well and good, and the sort of thing an MMO is supposed to have, but the speed and pacing of basic gameplay most reminds me of Auto Assault, a game in which traditional party-based coherence was extremely hard work, due to everyone moving about too fast and far apart. I've yet to actually try group work to be fair, but I suspect it'll be hard work here, for many of the same reasons it was in Auto Assault, and even then, it might just be easier to bring a full team of DPS types, rather than work the usual tank-healer-damage sort of thing. How well differentiated classes will actually work in this sort of game, I've yet to see. Perhaps I just found the tired old Trinity somehow inappropriate in a game about pew pew spaceships.
- Clicky
The game seems a little floatey on the controls. It features click-to-move, with left click being a combined target/move to/autofollow and right-click being a non-targeting move to command. Trouble is, the speed the ship cruises along at means you reach a distantly clicked move-to point very quickly, necessitating many such clicks to get about. This also gets quite frantic if you want to try combat more advanced than following the target, shooting. Since most of the Mantis all close to melee range when engaged, you just end up parked in front of each other trading blows until one of you blows up. Use of alternate LMB/RMB is hectic, but can allow you to kite them a bit more effectively. WASD keys work, but are a bit sluggish; holding W while pressing D will make your ship turn, but with a noticeable delay. Possibly all this stuff is remapable and I didn't notice, but it just seemed like ship control could be a bit tighter to me.
I do like this one a lot, but probably not as a 'serious MMO', whatever that means. As a filler, in short bursts when there isn't time for an extended session of something more in depth, Pirate Galaxy serves admirably to entertain. I'm not sure I'd put any money into it though; to me, the harvesting seems a necessary part of the game, and anyway, their tariff is a bit steep for the knickknacks you can buy in. For example, the Anjin 1450 is the next ship up from the starter noobship, requires level 7 to fly and 126 Crystal in-game, which will take about ten or so missions to earn, but if you are lazy, you can just buy one from the item shop for about 7 Euros/10 Dollars/6 Pounds. I have no idea what that is compared to other F2P games since they all set their own markets, but seems somewhat poor value for money to me.
Still, that is just me, and apart form grumblings about RMT which probably deserve their own post shortly, I'm finding Pirate Galaxy well worth a look.
Final Verdict: Casual Carefree Fun. An excellent drop-in MMO for those smaller sessions.
Still got the Vanguard write-up in the works, and it'll feature on the very next podcast before that, so watch this space!
author: Van Hemlock | posted @ Thursday, August 27, 2009 7:38 PM |
Here we go again:
Van Hemlock (Ep 65): Business As Usual
Nothing experimental or outdoorsey about this show, and very much a case of two people talking about things that have happened in online gaming, and things they have done while playing online games. News, and about four weeks of What We’re Playing!
author: Van Hemlock | posted @ Monday, August 24, 2009 6:42 PM |
A fine day out last weekend, visiting all manner of online friends who mostly only exist as names on blogs and characters in computer games. Always nice to put faces and voices to folks who might otherwise exist only as text to me; a kind of validation or grounding in reality perhaps, in a hobby that I do worry may become a little more ephemeral than is healthy sometimes.
Much of the day was spent at the big Namco arcade on the south bank of the Thames, near the Millennium Eye, a suitably appropriate sort of venue for our little gathering, but the more I wandered about the place, the more disillusioned I found myself becoming. Our recent day trip to the seaside at Swanage evoked a similar kind of experience. Being a seaside tourist spot, the town had a couple of the obligatory amusement arcades which I also had a quick drift through. Aside from anything else, I’ve never quite seen the association between blue-green surf, golden sands and blowing dune grass, and dark rooms full of bright lights, brash noises and computer games. It doesn’t make sense, but every seaside town has them.
In both the examples above, the sense of tawdry reality and faded nostalgia descended on me like leaden clouds, and the modern amusement arcade is very much a different place than the ones I remembered from my formative teenaged years. This is partly because I’ve changed, but only partly, and much of my disappointment seems to be objective and justified.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, the amusement arcade was such a wondrous place that I’d often be nearly sick with excitement at the thought that the funfair was coming to town. I’d cycle there with a bulging pocket of 10ps and spend a whole Saturday, at once enthralled and amazed at what technology could achieve in the service of fun. Family holidays at Butlins would see me more than happy to give the parents as much peace and quiet as they wanted, as long as the coins held out, and I’d only reappear at mealtimes, distracted and fidgeting, only to vanish again immediately.
Exotic machines sporting fantastic titles; Shinobi, Alien Syndrome, Operation Wolf, Altered Beast, Outrun, Star Wars (Where you got to fly an X Wing!), Battle Zone and more. Golden Axe was a personal favourite, one of the few arcade machines I ever completed, ironically enough as half of a two-man PUG in a busy arcade. “Mind if I join in?” “Go for it!” There was even a small crowd around us as we got near the end. I don’t remember the chap’s name now, but a kind of achievement all the same. Probably cost me less than £2 to do as well!
An integral part of the experience was the initial floor-walk, scoping out the place, seeing what was new and the arcade was always a place of advanced technological innovation. Looking at the modern arcade I find that previous sentence tragically laughable, and I couldn’t see any video game at Namco, or Swanage, that my PC couldn’t massively outperform. Hell, the cast-off Xbox I inherited was a closer par to the few remaining games machines on display and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if I were to lever the back off one to see a lone Playstation 2 cowering in the centre of the cavernous vastness of the coin-op casing.
The home games console has pretty much killed the amusement arcade I knew, and although there was a period in the late nineties where elaborate peripherals might have turned the tide; the Dance Dance Revolutions, the skateboard and snowboard games, even these extras and add-ons have made it to the living room, with dance mats and balance boards. With the demonstration of Project Natal, Microsoft’s motion capture gizmo, I’d say home gaming has well and truly pulled ahead of the arcade game, leaving the relic-filled darkened seaside halls I’d seen this summer, filled with coin-drop machines, grabby-crane games and the real mainstays of the amusement arcade, the fruit machines. The amusement arcade is no longer ours, and belongs to a different kind of customer now.
As something of an epitaph, the most elaborate video game I saw at Namco, was Guitar Hero ‘Arcade’, which appeared to be functionally identical to the home console version, only costing a pound a go. (Zoso got 2nd place on a ZZ Top number!) Perhaps there remain outposts of progress and beacons of innovation, but for me, the amusement arcade is well and truly dead, killed by the convenience of the living room console.
Regardless, I enjoyed myself overall; great people, decent food, and a grand day out. Looking forward to the next!
author: Van Hemlock | posted @ Friday, August 21, 2009 11:33 AM |
Huge showbiz feud unfolds!
Van Hemlock Podcast (Ep 64): When Wasps ATTACK!
Another outdoorsey experimental one, this time lounging on the grass at the West Dean Chili Fiesta on a lovely day and not nearly as car-based as previous. General rumination of gaming, wasps, bad cider, and swine flu, with special guests! Intro bit and Twitter question were solo affairs this time, which is a lot harder than folks who solo-host entire podcasts make it look!
The alluded to showbiz feud will probably be resolved by next week, when we'll be getting some semblance of normality back to proceedings, but still a few more days out to come, and it's London next! Tootle pip!
author: Van Hemlock | posted @ Friday, August 14, 2009 3:33 PM |