2014. nov. 13.

Did you ever think about what a virtual reality would be today, at your home, in a form realizable and available on any day? Hereby I mean no virtual reality in general but in a specialized form of virtual world that is not separable easily from the real one. I mean it is a virtual environment that can be considered as another world, but it mixes with our current environment. Well, I was thinking about this a lot years ago, and I believe that good (and sometimes bad) ideas can emerge in more than one head worldwide, and in the same time, of course. (For skeptics: Having no scientific explanation for something doesn’t mean that the given thing cannot exist, does it?) This real virtuality idea could be such a thing because Funcom made it and released it summertime, this year – however, the idea had the come up for this years ago, maybe in that time when I was thinking about it too. I can’t remember when had an MMO such an impressive effect on me. Anno the ad of The Secret World was considered special; besides the usual e-mail newsletters they started a Facebook application titled Secret War, in which you had to use your social network to get points and win ingame items, and a closed beta keycode if you reached the maximum. After this I was waiting for the game with the usual mix of disinterest + mild curiosity. I was watching only a few of the trailers, and I paid attention to the big words of advertising only with one eye. Then I got a beta key and started it. Perhaps the first hours will show you no novelty. Seasoned MMO-players can go forward by watching only the quality, which is good enough, 4/5 in the MMO category. So, you start in a city environment with a tutorial, then you make a jump into the Agartha, which is something like a fugue dimension with much shorter distances between locations. The first such location is the town of Kingsmouth, full of zombies. Zombies again, yes? If you can live with this gnawed bone, you may dive into the details that...

2014. nov. 13.

Although I could be totally heroic for free in the microtransaction model of Champions Online, I chose Spider-Man as le mien actuelle superbe. The cause is simple: He follows my life since I was a little piglet, and though today I don’t collect his adventures anymore, but my adoration didn’t lessened a bit. This is a silent adoration sitting deep in my heart, and it is highly selective, so sometimes I judge some products unentertaining. But this is another topic, I intend to write another article about them in the future. This latest version was released in December 2010, and was made amusing. The story is embarrassing a little for me, because generally Spidey doesn’t used to meddle into world-saving quests — the comic book stories are mostly revolving around Peter Parker‘s common man characteristics, even during his super-encounters he mainly rather gets into a supporting role than being a tank of the team. In fact, in this game his teammates are he, he and himself. Well, the fundamentals: One of the returning enemies of Spider-Man, Mysterio emerges again to get a powerful, magic stone tablet from the museum (’cause there is always a stupid director of the museum who tends to exhibit some brutal artifact with minimal safety). I don’t wanna go into deeper analysis, but the above mentioned “common man characteristic” of Spider-Man are emphasized further by some of his adversaries, who are not necessary superbeings. For example, here is Mysterio, a well-learned but power-hungry prestidigitator, hypnotist and expert of special effects, without any superhuman abilities. Spidey simply jumps through his illusions, then knocks him out by a well-aimed move. The usual neglectfulness of Spider-Man causes the trouble again: This well-aimed move goes through the problematic stone tablet, which scatters in the world. To be more exact, it scatters in four worlds, and the great adventure begins. Shattered Dimensions takes the world of the Amazing Spider-Man as a starting point, and introduces three other ones. All of them were presented in various comic book series, so you get nothing new, except the unimaginably novel serving. The four settings (Amazing, Ultimate, Noir, 2099) and the characters belonging to them are offering four different...

2014. nov. 13.

The world of Warhammer 40.000 was made up of incredibly hard, cold and factual elements. Creators of Space Marine got this well, and they spiced the stuff with the marine heroism you can see on numberless pictures painted for the tabletop game. The result is among those very few games to which I tend to give maximal droidscore. Maybe, till now there was no such game in GD’s history. WH40K setting is extremely gothic, cosmic and apocalyptic, desperately dark, fantastic and hopeless in the same time, so in short: it’s not simple. Sometimes it called dystopian science fantasy, and this shows well that it’s not classifiable, so a distinct category was made. The name is telling: We are in the 41st millennium, when humans already populated the galaxy. During doing this it met some things, for example the Ork race spreading like a plague, or the Eldars living on their so-called Craftworlds after they left their home planets which (literally) became the embodiment of the race’s most chaotic nightmare. Anyway, they are not the real problem here, but the warping forces of Chaos and the swarm-like Tyranids are. There are other races too, and every one of them would fill a whole book, so I stick to the basics here. As in countless other settings, human is the average race here. They have high level technology but only some weaker psi abilities, and in spite of maintaining a strict order they always lie under the lure of Chaos. The Emperor’s Children Legion is a fine example here: They was so addicted to the sensations of battle and victory that they fell to Slaanesh, the Chaos god of perverse pleasures. Humankind is a so-called “collector-race” by every means: It mixes Orkish ferocity, Eldar technology and the unpredictability of Chaos. Orks are green-skinned, violent neo-barbarians. They live by wolfish laws and believe war can solve every problem. Although they are in constant war with other races, there are frequent skirmishes even between the allied clans, be it a simple bar brawl, a battle for an area or even a holy war. They practically have no fear of death, and we can hear about artfully wrought ork...

2014. nov. 13.

Some Pen and Paper RPG worlds are adopted to video games time and time again, thanks not to the never ceasing worship of fans but to these worlds itself for being such great hits. For example, there are innumerous Forgotten Realms games, and the newest is the much awaited Neverwinter MMO from the software-welders of Cryptic. The situation is more or less the same with The Dark Eye adaptations; after the recent Drakensang Online, the Chains of Satinav was released in 2012, and it exceeded my expectations. I already wrote about and glorified the world of the German The Dark Eye on GameDroid, in a review of Drakensang: The River of Time, so I don’t enter into details too much. In essence, it is a more than 30 years old role-playing game of German characteristics like precision and complexity, but it has a mostly average world setting. No wonder it was called German D&D once. More than one reasons made me glad to see this game in the shops. On the one hand I am a quiet fan of The Dark Eye, and I like to roam in the world of Drakensang. For me it seems more collected than its American parallels. I don’t really know why, but I have a feeling that in spite of being an average fantasy world, Drakensang is different somehow. On the other hand I am a quiet fan of the point and click style too. I don’t collect pnc games, but I readily appreciate this interactive kind of storytelling is, and I like to test my logic on the challenges. Syberia is one of my all time favs, and Machinarium also gave several pleasant game hours. It is just reasonable that I picked up on the meeting of my two favorites. And they didn’t made me disappointed. In my memories, the story was like reading a book, and the game was sometimes hard but always logical in the given situations. Geron, the aide of the local bird-catcher has a really bad reputation. Of course, the breaking fragile things around him don’t help a bit, and partly because of this, partly because of a bonfired Seer‘s last divination the...

2014. nov. 12.

Generally I like crossovers in every area, because if the creators are combining the elements of various genres well, the mix can be something good, even if the product shows no really new or unique content in the depths. Since the re-adoptation of Blood Bowl the name of the french Cyanide started to be the synonym of quality entertainment, and the fine-tuned crossover of Of Orcs and Men wrote it onto the list of companies drawing attention. Even the title grabbed my attention, because it refers to Steinbeck‘s Of Mice and Men, and the similarity goes further. We get the small and agile character as well as the slow giant, and there is a sentence in the synopsis of the book that fits well on this very game: “…clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.” The trailers bought me with the story: Humans wage total war against the greenskins, a part of the orc race is already eradicated, and the other part is mostly enslaved. But humans did not take an important thing into account: The orcs seem wild, unorganized and barbaric on the outside, but in fact they have an advanced culture with mostly strength-based but solidly contoured power hierarchy in it. And, you know, they have an elite squad. These elites are the Bloodjaws, and have a jaw tattoo on the right breast – and of course the main hero, Arkail is a part of the team. You get the mission summarized in a very orcish way: Get through the wall, search and kill the emperor! Really, this is it. But the completion is much more difficult than the summary of the mission. The first and most important thing: They hire a guide for you to lead you through the city wall. He is no other than Styx, the only goblin in the world ever heard speaking and ever showed signs of intelligence. Not to mention, he is the narrator of the story and swearing is not far from him. So that’s it, you have the odd couple, and their only mutual attribute is their green skin. The differences would make an enormous list, so I stick to the essentials....

2014. nov. 11.

When talking about fantasy MMOs, LotRO mustn’t be left out. This online variation of the the world of Lord of the Rings is worthy of the big ancestor and namegiver, and although gameplay is not so unique, you won’t find too many flaws in it. It is free since September (2010.), for which cause it was left by thousands and started by millions, so the conversion seems like a valid pull. There is a disagreement on the web between the fans of f2p (free to play) and pfp (pay for play), but I won’t go into it: I see reasons in both the fully paying and the microtransaction model alike. I rather write about the game. The American publisher, Turbine (and Codemasters in Europe) follows the same principle in LotRO than in Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO): A free player can have such points that he/she can use for paying in the online store of the game, so this way even free players can have almost anything that paying players get. While in DDO you need to complete the quests again and again (this repetition was why I get bored of it time and time again, but otherwise it’s a good game), LotRo handles this part of the system as a separate type of tasks. These are the heroic deeds, and although they are in a defined number, but playing with two characters (free game allows only two) you still can get enough Turbine Points to get horses, maybe remove the money cap, buy some quest packs (each belongs to one or other lands of Middle Earth), etc. If you create the two characters to augment each other in ways, you can easily find yourself undecided regarding which one you will play next time you start the game. I ran forward a little. I was at the tasks: Besides heroic deeds there is an epic story, and between the quests of it you can handle all the sidequests, your hobby, your crafts and the events of the war. Ups, this sounds a bit too many in the same breath — indeed it is. It is so many that I mostly neglect the main story,...