Neverpants

So show your support of  No Pants Gaming in Neverwinter and get rid of those pesky pants right at level one!

And yes, you can put pants on when you get something worth the stats.

So that’s what I’m doing. But before time gets away from me completely, I thought it best (okay, Zeli thought it best and told me) to write a “final” post for the site. The good news is, if you still want to see and hear what I’m doing on the internet, I have been working on some other stuff. For a while now I’ve wanted to get back into blogging, but I wanted to do something different. So, I’ve got a couple tumblr sites going. One was created during a discussion I had one night with Zeli and Abb about horrible looking MMO characters. So, I made wtfMMOcharacters. The other is a faux newspaper blog set in the world of Tyria, called The Orr Orator. It’s something different and I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

If you miss the podcast (especially if you’ve been around since the CoTcast days), I have some good news. While it’s not multi-game show, Zeli started up a new cast for our guild in Guild Wars 2, RavenKast. Check it out!

I loved working on Multiplaying. I will never think for a second that my time with it was wasted. I only hope you don’t hate me for closing the book on this one, and that you enjoyed it while it lasted.

Slurms…. signing off.

The players weren’t sleeping. Who needed a bed?
With visions of Tyria dancing in their head.
Huntersinsight was snuggled with his plush little charr
His five year journey had brought him this far.

Slurms was plotting the name of his ranger lass,
trading in his famous mustache for a female norn’s ass.
Vejuz was surrounded with caffeine and some booze,
not sure which would keep him going, but he couldn’t afford to snooze!

Rer was all primed with pizza and Coke,
we all knew him skipping this game had been a big joke.
Rowanblaze’s journey had been full of zombies of late
to step foot into Tyria’s beautiful world he just could not wait.

Craythur was snug in his freshly cleaned abode
Waiting for the time to get the game to load.
Jazz and Moxie, and Paeroka too
Stocked up with goodies to get them through.

The wait was intolerable! The clock seemed not to budge!
A collective twitter wail was heard. “OMG! What the fudge!”
Their hearts couldn’t take it! They were going to explode!
Some were so drunk they had to worship the golden commode.

And then suddenly across the internet there arose such a clatter
as keyboards went wild, and all the snacks went a scatter.
Launch had arrived, logins were a blazing.
Shiny eyes expecting Guild Wars 2 to be simply amazing.

It was bound to happen. That new shiny feeling of falling in love starts to get just a little tarnished. Somewhere after that initial “Wow!” factor dies off, you inevitably move into the more steady routine with your new love. Some of those quirky, new things that made your heart do a little pitter patter in the beginning now start to irritate the piss out of you every now and then. But you still love them. You just have to take big deep breaths and walk away every now and then.

That’s where I am right now with The Secret World. No, this isn’t a doom and gloom post. I’m still enjoying the game immensely. But it isn’t all shiny, happy feelings all the time anymore. Our love affair has diminished, just a little.

One of the things I found quirky and entertaining initially was the depth of the story telling. I still love it. But everything is just so lengthy. Between the cut scenes and the difficulty of the game itself, it is almost impossible to just jump into the game and do something quick. Unlike real love affairs where the quickie becomes more the norm and you long for something, err, longer… with TSW, I’d like a few quickies now and then.

The other thing that I’m finding increasingly irritating is the number of solo instances. I’m not sure what the thinking was with this one. I understand doing some solo instances in the main story quest line. Having to progress in your story, working some puzzles on your own. I’m assuming if you are running a different faction, the story is going to differ a bit. So solo instances in your main mission makes sense. But frequently, I’ll be running regular missions alongside my fellow Templar, Purrcy, when bam! Solo instance at the end.

I mean, I love you baby, but can’t I spend some time with my friends?

I’m still enjoying my love affair with TSW though. But every once in a while, TSW gets that exasperated glare and huff signaling we need a little break. But it’s okay, baby.  I always come back for more.

If you told me “TF2 is going to have co-op,” I would not have been very excited. Leave it to Valve’s ability to make an amazing video to change that.

Gaming in 2012 has been different for me. I’ve still been playing a bunch (and buying a bunch), but there’s not been any huge knockouts for me personally. August may change that in a big way. Not only is Guild Wars 2 less than 2 weeks away and will no doubt cause me to stay up later than I should for many nights post-release, but Dark Souls is finally going to be in my possession again; this time on my platform of choice.

When you spend the kind of money it takes to be a PC gamer, you sort of expect certain things from the games your computer was built for. This is doubly true for those of us who play both PC and console games. While there may be some experiences meant for the couch (fighting games come to mind), I know that the visual fidelity on my computer will almost always be superior. I better be. Sure, that’s not what makes the game fun, but we human beings like pretty things. So as a human video game lover, I want my games to be pretty. Dark Souls is already a “pretty” game. Yet, I always looked at it and wondered how much more stunning it could be with PC hardware pushing the engine to its limits.

With the reports that both the framerate and the resolution will be locked on the PC, it seems that I won’t get my wish. From Eurogamer:

“There’s also something curious about the resolution too in that there’s no change in clarity when attempting to crank up the settings. On close inspection, it appears that Dark Souls PC uses the very same 1024×720 internal framebuffer as the console versions, regardless of which resolution has been set in the menus. The option provided is for output resolution only; a simple courtesy to allow the game to play on most monitors, but the image quality will always remain the same. In short, PC gamers will very much be getting the genuine console experience here, right down to the pixel.”

Sure, in the long run we’ll probably see someone hack the game and unlock both of these things, allowing Dark Souls to become the game we all wanted the developers to make in the first place. In the meantime though, it’ll be like playing on a console. A horrible… dirty console. The kind of thing poor people play games on. Ugh… poor people. Does this change my preorder status? Not at all. And I don’t mean this post to be a warning for everyone to stay away. On the contrary, if by some chance buying the game helps show Atlus and From Software that the PC community wants what they’re cooking, by all means they can have my forty bucks. Maybe because of the demand and financial support of the PC gaming community, the inevitable next chapter in the “Souls” series will get a proper high definition release. Until then though, I’m taking this version of the game for what it is. A straight up “port” in every sense of the word, but my second time around with one of my all time favorite games.

One of the things that I enjoy about The Secret World is that even with its dark setting, the stories and quests have good amount of humor. Last night in The Secret World, I ran a mission with @rmerrifield that had me literally laughing and smiling more than any quest in an MMO has in a very, very long time. There may be some minor spoilers here, so stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens here.

The mission was Theme Park Tycoon. You find Nicholas Winter outside of the Atlantic Island Park. It seems his father was a billionaire tycoon who left his son nothing of his fortune other than this most unfortunate amusement park. As you can imagine, it is overrun with all types of ghosts and ghouls and other such things that make you afraid of the dark.

It starts out harmless enough. Go to the Octotron. Turn it on. Then pops up the message: Survive until the ride is over. Uh oh. I won’t go into the specifics but we did survive. Next up, the Sideshow Alley. I was not so fortunate here as this little carnival game was out for vengeance. You had to figure out a way to disable it. Luckily for me, @rmerrifield was able to figure out how as I ran back to my body.

There are a few other “kill this” kind of steps in the mission. Where the tears of laughter started was at what seemed like the most harmless of things. Go to the Ferris Wheel. Examine it. Go to the next ride. Sounds easy, right? Well, let me tell you, getting off the Ferris Wheel  platform is anything other than easy. And not for the reasons you may be thinking. No, we weren’t swarmed by hordes of the undead. One single specter of a carnie popped up. And with a magic kick in the ass, he knocked us off our feet every time we got back up. I was kicked off the platform fairly early on and was able to get away. I was able to literally laugh out loud as I watched @rmerrifield get continuously knocked down, wondering how she would ever get out of the endless loop.  She eventually did, of course, laughing as hard as I was.

The final stage in the mission was in the bumper car arena. Confronted with the TSW version of the Texas Chainsaw fella, we also had to dodge and weave our way through the demon bumper cars. Let me tell you, those bumper cars packed a wallop. Here’s the TSW scarecrow guy with a nasty chainsaw chasing you about and the little Satan cars trying to knock your knees out. Perhaps you had to be there to appreciate the humor. But it was fun.

This is one of the reasons I have found myself drawn into The Secret World so thoroughly. Sure, there are the standard MMO quest templates. Go here. Find this. Kill this. But often times, the presentation is so completely different from anything I have experienced before that it just doesn’t feel like all the old MMOs. Taking a trip on a haunted roller coaster? Definitely something I have never done before. Walloped by demon bumper cars? All new to me. Anything that can make me laugh that hard? Something that I’ve been  missing for quite a while now.

Week 1: Discover Minecraft. Holy hamsters! You can build shit with these bricks!

Week 2: I have to stay up another hour tonight to mine “X” because I’m making “Y”, but it’s gonna be SOOO RAD! Oh Enderman, YOU SO CRAZY! Totally not looking at you, btw

Week 3: I totally finished what I was trying to make and it is, in fact, the best thing ever created in all of Minecraft.

Week 4: I’ve walked 500 laps around my creation, basking in it’s glory, bowing in awe in it’s majesty as the sun slowly sets behind it. I guess it’s time to move on to another project.

Week 5: I got nothin’. Laters, Minecraft!

Spend the next “Z” months playing other games.

Repeat.

As far as what I make in Minecraft, I’m the type who enjoys firing up a new map on the game, exploring around a bit for a nice spot and then building something into the landscape that looks natural. I love seeing the big creations in the game as well, those ARE the most impressive, but for my personal space I keep it a bit simpler. Mountainside retreats, tree houses, Supervillain-esque Underground Dwellings (ltd.), etc.

This marks the second adventure in brickland with fellow podcasters Jason and that wife of his Shannon, and so far the construction of our mountaintop fortresses and homes are coming along swimmingly. We’ve hit bedrock in a couple of spots and Shannon has recently erected a tower that touches the sky. In between we have a stone house that was built right into the mountainside and I’m building TreeFort v2 on the far side of our hilltop empire.

I usually don’t give much pause to Minecraft. It’s a brilliant game, I love the look of it, but most of the time I’m going full bore towards a goal. There’s rarely a moment that takes me aback or makes me think, beyond “does this stone penis look too crooked?” But Saturday night I had one.

In real life, we had some hellish rain come through. It was so bad that it brought to light that we had a leak in our roof. We know this now because the water was leaking through the ceiling and into my cloffice. The place we were all sitting due to a tornado warning. Eventually the warning went away so the wife and kids went back to bed. Then I logged in to Minecraft and what was the first thing I saw? A leak. Water droplets were falling from a single block on the ceiling above me. I didn’t realize Shannon had installed a small pool in the upstairs room.

I sat there stunned for a moment and thought, “Games must be art, because this one is imitating my life.”

Steve "Slurms" Lichtsinn

Blogger and Podcast host for Multiplaying. All viewpoints in my words whether written or spoken are my own, and do not reflect the views of the community I am a part of. I don't do this for a living, and it shows!

After the last GW2 beta weekend event, I found myself really excited for GW2. And really… bored. I’ve been on much of a gaming hiatus for about the last 21 months. For those who don’t know, I have a new baby. During the first trimester, I simply couldn’t game because it gave me motion sickness. Then after that, I simply had little time to game. I gave Skyrim and ME3 a shot. Both games are unfinished. I gave the old college try to SWTOR, but simply had little time for it.

So perhaps this is just a case of “the right timing”. The baby is a year old now and has a more regular schedule. She also will occupy herself a little bit more now (she’s sitting in the floor playing while I write this, with only a few shooing away from my laptop incidents). I blame Twitter for my eventual collapse to peer pressure. All my Twitter Tweeps were absolutely beaming about how great is TSW.

I bought it a week ago and have no regrets. The premise is that every urban legend, every story about the boogie man you have ever heard is, in fact, true. There is a whole hidden world out there. You have been recruited to join in the fight against this evil. And, depending on your faction, you have different reasons for going out there amongst the walking dead.

After the initial tutorial cut scene that shows how you were recruited into your faction, everyone starts out in the same starting area. Kingsmouth Town. It’s a poor small town in New E ngland that has been beset by zombies and other foul creatures. You are thrown right into the mix, asked to help rid the area of some of the unfortunate townsfolk that have been transformed.

It is by no means standard MMO quest fodder though. The difference lies in that there are no quest hubs with shiny “click here for a quest” symbols above NPC heads. Some missions you stumble upon. Box of squid, you say? Let’s see where this goes. Oh, a severed arm. Who does this belong to?

Certain missions are given via cut scenes. And they are quite well done. The voice acting is good and the story better. In fact, I’ve found myself drawn into the story much more than I was with SWTOR. That is not a slam against TOR by any means. I liked the story there as well. I simply like this one better, at least so far. Perhaps it is because The Secret World story is an open book whereas TOR had the immense Star Wars universe as its backdrop. While I love the Star Wars lore, I do also know more about it and it was much easier to predict what would happen next.

There is far more to the game than just slicing and dicing up some putrid corpses for missions. Certain missions require you to, gasp!, use your brain. These are called puzzle missions. Some are more easily solved than others. Others, well, TSW gives you an in game browser for a reason. You will use Google at some point most likely. Another type of mission requires you to use “finesse and subterfuge” to achieve your mission goals. For instance, sneaking around the airport where if you are caught, some men in black type folks will zap you with stun guns and you see nothing but your feet as you are dragged off the property.

There is reward for exploration by finding hidden lore or missions you may not otherwise have found. There are instances, although that is one area I have not yet ventured. I have heard some complain that combat is “bland”. Perhaps it can be considered that. For me personally, it has not been an issue because I see it as almost secondary to the rest of game play.

There are lots of hidden goodies. Go through the covered bridge in Kingsmouth once while alive and once while dead and you’ll see what I mean. There are references to sci fi and horror pop culture here and there. They have done a great job with the music and sound effects. Like any good horror show, you know something is about to go down when you hear the ominous music and the ground starts shaking. A few missions have been downright creepy. They have also gone to great lengths to add some “reality” to the game. Just check out the Kingsmouth, Maine webpage  for an idea.

All in all, I would recommend this game. Even if you aren’t into the X-files or Stephen King, it can be fun and immersive. I’m really into neither. I’ve watched enough X-files only to know who the main characters are. I’m not much of a horror fan these days. I had to Google Lovecraft to find out who he was (don’t judge me). Funcom promises monthly updates and have delivered their first on July 31. Will it be enough to entice long term play? Only time will tell. But for now, the future looks full of zombies and other things that go bump in the night.