Archive for category Gamey
Things of a busy nature
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, MMO-related, Personal on October 20th, 2008
Eh, the delay between updates here is a little annoying to me. It’s annoying partially because I feel like I should update on a regular basis, but also because I know, in part, that I can’t update because I can’t tell you everything I’m doing – so even when I do say something, I might not be able to say everything. Sorry.
I’ve been busy, if that much isn’t obvious by the silence.
Here’s what I’d call a ‘non-spoiler’ update though, for those who are interested. Read the rest of this entry »
FPS by numbers
I finished Call of Duty 4 today, which was sort of surprising as I thought I had ages left to play through. Turns out ‘Act I’ was the longest of the three, so without even trying hard, I suddenly came to the end.
Probably took me about 10-12 hours to play, which I know these days is seen as “Too short” but for me it’s just right. (I like to finish stuff, and preferably not over a period of months and months – unless we’re talking some super-engrossing strategy game, and those don’t often appear on console.)
Overall experience? Pretty good, but I came away thinking it wasn’t the breakthrough FPS experience I thought it might well be, judging by some reviews. Perhaps that’s because it’s not that up-to-date (it did come out in 2007) but actually, I think it’s because I felt like I’d seen it all before:
- The ‘hold off the bad guys for X amount of time’ mission
- The ‘escape under heavy fire’ mission
- The ‘fire on people from a flying thing’ mission
- The ‘shoot from the back of a moving vehicle’ mission
Re-learning to love City of Heroes
As I’ve said many times in many an interview and to many people in person, City of Heroes was the reason I joined NCsoft.
In April or May 2004, I can’t recall, I was playing the game (on the US servers, natch) and enjoying it so much that I was considering starting a fansite about it, based around a twinned blog – one character based, one player based. A very good friend of mine said to me: “Instead of making all that effort for nothing, why not go and work for them instead?”
The rest is history. (Funny thing is, I never did get around to that blog idea.)
While I worked for NCsoft I never stopped playing City of Heroes (Well – not altogether), but of course I was privy to a lot of behind the scenes information. Which meant often, very little came as a complete and total surprise. (And if it did, it was often not a good surprise.)
Which is why it’s great, now, to start to look at the game from a genuine, uninformed player’s perspective again. Today the EU site is hosting a Developer Diary focusing on the Day Jobs system from Issue 13, and it makes for a very interesting read. Read the rest of this entry »
Spending October inside
Autumn’s here, and it’s not going to let you forget it.
After a brief respite last weekend, where I lay about on green grass near my house reading Piers Paul Read’s biography of Alec Guinness, the weather since has just gotten progressively worse. To the point where I didn’t even want to leave the house today. The fact that I was supposed to be going to the gym had nothing to do with it, you understand.
I did leave the house though, and I even made it to the gym. If I hadn’t though, I’d probably have stayed in and played games. Which is as good a segue as any, I suppose, to what I’m playing. Read the rest of this entry »
You said what?