Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.Have you been reading Spinks lately? The woman is on fire! Lots worth reading over there, including in the comments. See Spinks on StarCraft 2 (Zubon: “WTB LAN”), tank gear (Spinks: “STFU”), cosmetic gear (I still want it as CoX unlocks rather than as inventory items), and a news summary post with actually worth reading quick comments on the news items.
: Zubon
Team Fortress 2 has been an interesting mess since the Engineer update. You can trade your sentry gun’s ability to upgrade for ridiculous building speed or its self-targeting for a remote control, but the greater change is letting all Engineers pack up their buildings and move them. Fully upgraded sentries are popping up all over the place, fast, while they are also being shot down faster than they can be reassembled. Two weeks ago, you might plead for a second Engineer, and now you’re considering moving to a server that caps them. You can be annoyed at the insanity or embrace it, being your team’s seventh Engineer or picking a class to counter them.
The attached achievements are actually healthy. I am used to seeing achievements for aberrant gameplay or freakish occurrences, like getting mid-air melee kills while rocket-jumping or encouraging medics to attack instead of using an uber-charge. The Engineer achievements are largely for things you should be doing anyway, and most of them encourage teamwork, particularly between Engineers. There are achievements for helping someone else build, for upgrading their buildings, for healing their buildings, for saving them from Spies, and from getting Engi-Engi kill assists. There are achievements demanding dispensers and teleporters. The Wrangler (remote control) gives an Engineer the Sniper’s narrowed focus, but the rest rewards a utility class for being team-focused. Excellent!
: Zubon
Syp is starting Book 14 in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, and I hate to warn him, but it mostly gets worse as you progress. That epic chain does have a few good fights in instances, but the whole is a train wreck of fetch quests, travel, and reminders that you are a little nothing in the storyline.
When your epic quest starts with a trip to buy honey, that should be a warning sign. It is not a battle or all about the journey; he wants expensive honey for the trip, from one of the starter towns. He wants you to visit another town for cutlery moulds. Yeah. This chain will send you to all the starter towns and across the trackless tundra. Epicness includes running across town to talk to a stablehand and walking across a building to tell someone what you just clicked on. It also mixes forced group and forced solo (instanced) content, so that you are likely to need multiple groups to get through it, even if your group held together through all the travel.
The big fight scenes are good. They can be challenging. There is a solo instance that is really great content, where you play the Ranger than every Hunter wants to be but never will (nyah nyah). It also includes one of the worst instances in the game, a repeat of a earlier map from an enemy perspective in which you kill slugs (slowly) and kick orcs awake (slowly) while running from end to beginning to end to beginning. It is a speed bump that will make you long for the hour you might spend on horses riding between towns.
If you miss that, you have Book 15 to look forward to. Epic travel while AFK on a horse!
: Zubon
For those of us inclined to do so, the healer is a great role. Yes, it has problems in PUGs when three different people pull then blame the healer, but it is rewarding to see your friends made into boundless engines of destruction and victory.
Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.
As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.
This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.
The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.
: Zubon
Just sayin.’ The servers are under heavy load at the moment.
: Zubon
It is a rare event when my wife says that I really ought to blog about a flash game.
The gameplay in Viricide is pretty standard: shoot the enemies that come on-screen, collect bits to buy upgrades. You get more toys and a better ship over time, while the enemies get more diverse. Good, and you have probably played something similar before.
The level introductions are what sell it. You are killing bugs in a computer. You fix its systems, and it talks to you. The humor starts with displays of the problems you are fixing, such as excessive enthusiasm or explaining the obvious. It visits a less friendly computer. You then go into the background story, which could be successful or not; I expect that people rejecting the emotional manipulation will find another layer of humor in it.
: Zubon
Where Duels of the Planeswalkers failed to scratch that itch, I am finding Elements surprisingly engaging. It has many options but a shallow learning curve, making gameplay simple but diverse.
Elements is an online collectible card game. It is free, although they accept donations. You get new cards by winning matches in-game or by using the in-game currency (“electrum”), which is also gained by winning matches. A daily “Oracle” also offers a bit of cash, chance of a rare card, and a buff for 1 PvE match.
If you have played Magic, you know the basic structure. Elements has 12 colors of mana (“quanta”) and is heavily creature-focused with limited deck or gameplay manipulation and no counter-spelling. You can play against other players or several tiers of computer opponents, the top two tiers gaining advantages that are substantial and ridiculous respectively. You build up your stock of cards, design the deck you want to play with, and fight at the difficulty you choose.
Under the category of “pretty neat,” City of Heroes just released “Super Booster V: Mutant,” one of their mostly decorative microtransaction packs. Click through and scroll down to “Costume Change Emotes.” They’re nifty.
: Zubon
I occasionally post comments here on non-MMOs that have single- and multi-player options. I usually comment after the single-player experience. Someone invariably comments that I am not giving the game a fair trial unless I try the online multi-player. The games for which I do try the online multi-player, the other players are so horrible (as humans, not as skilled players, although sometimes both) that I refuse to play the game long enough to give it a fair shot. There need not even be many troublemakers: the perfect game to grief is one with few enough players that your impact is felt but too many to organize a kicking/banning, and bring a friend to become immune to most attempts to eliminate you.
The next comment, then, is that playing with a random online community is not giving it a fair shot. You need to have a guild/clan/whatever, be active on this message board with good people, visit this site, etc. Basically, bring your own community with you, sometimes for both teammates and opponents. Beyond the time investment that demands for a game (some of these “fair shot” multi-player conditions take longer to set-up than it does to play through the whole single-player game), once I am at the point of already playing with my known group of friends, it no longer matters much what we’re playing. The game is not contributing much at that point; I have done all the heavy lifting out-of-game by bringing the group. All we ask from the game at that point is not to be so horribly flawed that it ruins our time together. We’ve all tried things that horrible.
Basically, my ears are still ringing from someone’s mic spam while trying to find the mute command on a new game (as far as I can tell, it depends on “kick teammate” rather than having a mute), and I am feeling kindly towards those games that severely limit your in-game communications options. Limiting player interaction impairs a basic function of your game, but it prevents random people from actively making your game a worse place to be.
: Zubon
I heard good things about Puzzle Quest, so I picked up Puzzle Kingdoms on Steam during their summer blowout. It was not worth the $1, and I wish I had spent the time playing some random flash game.
Unless things change dramatically later on, it is just the one mini-game with some minor variations, like Bejeweled with some add-ons. You can go play Bejeweled right now. You and the computer are playing against each other on the same board with alternating turns, so it is a matter of playing denial while hoping something interesting falls into place. Of course, it falls into place in time for your opponent’s turn, so there is waiting and luck. The computer is tactically infallible but strategically hopeless, so it is a matter of getting an unsatisfying victory over an inept opponent, watching that opponent exploit something you cannot see (but it sees every possible combination), or hardly seeing what happens as it gets four or five combinations somehow falling from off-screen. The computer’s prescience is unlikely to be enough to save it, although it is a wonder to see it get two kills in one turn from blocks that were not on-screen when it started.
The gameplay is passable, although I found Warriors End a better version of the same thing. If you want that kind of thing, you get nothing else, so go to. The story is just bad: our hero is apparently conquering peaceful countries for their own good, but it’s okay because the dark lord is making them unhappy with magic boxes. You must destroy the magic box, even if that involves killing a path through a country that does not want your help. Nation-building through Bejeweled-based regime change.
There are also “RPG elements,” for when you feel like grinding a bit. Because sometimes mindlessly playing the same little thing and getting imaginary rewards is relaxing. It’s what we do here.
: Zubon
Oh, and Torchlight is $5 on Steam right now, in case you missed it during the last holiday sales.