2014. nov. 14.

Once upon a time I started as an article writer at GameDroid founded by a bunch of friends. Soon I became an editor, and after the general editors (padavan and Somesz, all the gods of games bless their names!) slowly stopped working on the e-zine, let’s say, I inherited it. Everything went good, GameDroid slowly increased the monthly number of its visitors, but a stupid turkish hackbot damaged it badly and offered only ads to the readers. In that times I almost gave it up, life went on, and although I accepted the offer of SFPortal (Thanks again!) regarding the webspace and the new engine, there was a lot of hesitating and so before this day came. We tried to rekindle the light in the heart of GameDroid, but the whole database was ruined. I feel sorrow for all the lost registrations, because there were constant readers. I hope they will find us again. We tried to remain the same and to renew in the same time. Our logo is the old one, but it got a new motto, and the appearance was changed as well. We found 75 Hungarian articles from the old ones, and we are bilingual again with almost 50 translations. Besides these GD offers the same content that collected thousands of readers in the old times: quality and subjective articles about old and new games in the Retro and Reviews columns, and other articles about games, gamers and their world under the Extras. Several writers from the old bunch still intend to contribute, and we have a new member too. Of course, GameDroid is still open for everyone to publish articles about games and gaming. If you are interested, contact us. (FB: GameDroid; e-mail: gamedroidinator_at_gmail_dot_com) Welcome to the old-new GameDroid!...

2014. nov. 14.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, Vindictus is on my Top 5 list of MMOs, and that was deserved by a pleasantly presented prologue, a coherent story, a finely tuned development system, and a destructible and weaponized environment, which latter is still not widely used in MMOs. Besides, Vindictus can stay on my Top 5 MMOs list, because it is improved continuously. I didn’t play it for years, so I couldn’t lure my old character out to the sun (but I couldn’t use her name either), but there was no worry about it. Since the publication of the article linked above there came three new characters, some serious Raids, and new game content called Season 2. (And ‘Episode 3’, and… —Garcius) The instance system changed not a bit; you still board a ship alone or with a little team, then there comes the hack’n’slash on the selected difficulty level and tricky skills for tearing the mobs apart. About the new Raid locations it is enough to mention that in spite of the earlier stages these offer rougher tasks done by bigger teams fighting against exceptionally hard bosses. However, the new characters are worth to be detailed a bit. I did not write about the older ones, because they embody the basic types: the knight Fiona builds on shield defense, Lann is an attacker with two swords, and the sorceress Evie throws fire and ice. The new threesome shows the extremities. Like Lann, Vella slashes around with twin swords, but her acrobatic style makes her a meat mincer built into a spinning-top. She reacts with easy jumps and direction changes for every button pushed, and instead of any block she protects herself by doing fast dodges. On the area of heavy beating, Karok offers a relatively easy playing style. This big guy walks with a waist-wide battle pillar on his shoulder, and the lower level boss fights are only about knocking the opponent out, then beating him till he comes to his senses. Then knocking him out again, then beating him till he comes to his senses. Then knocking him out again… Later the play with Karok goes harder, for example he will be able to...

2014. nov. 14.

I picked up on this game earlier, because there was some hurrah about its physical engine. In that time only North America and the Far East could play it, but today there is a European server too, so it came on and I tried it out, and since then I can’t really put it down. If I had to write a shortlist with the best MMOs of the world, Vindictus would be in the first ten. Maybe in the first five. Yeah, I admit it; the first twenty or twenty-five levels come easily, you quickly grow above your enemies, but starting on the third location you must pull up your socks. Broadly speaking, a game of real challenges and solo or team tactics starts here. Although character creation gives not much opportunities, the prologue is impressive. Its excellent quality is only one thing: besides, you can get an insight into gameplay and physical engine alike, and it lays the foundation of the main story – I don’t ask more from an intro. I would be glad if there are some more cutscenes in the continuation, but on the whole we can set this aside. An interesting element of the game is that you get no quests but you take part in shorter or longer stories in a war situation. If you are interested only in action, perhaps you will find it boring that sometimes you have to walk in circles around the town just to talk a heap of NPCs and get to the next step of the story. However, when it’s time for action, the real merit of Vindictus suddenly show itself. And it means indistinguishable levels of difficulty, an excellently working point system, and a nicely wrought physical engine. Because it’s not the same if you fight a Battle either on normal or hard level of difficulty. On normal level you will have not much trouble with your opponents, but on hard level the damage and accuracy of their attacks is increased, so you have to pay attention to not to be hit by them. Bosses attacking fast or in unexpected directions won’t make it easy. And how can a point system...

2014. nov. 14.

I cannot understand why certain games don’t become series. There is a unique setting, a good system and such a selection of characters which is much weaker in other games. What’s more, all of these contain so much opportunities that wouldn’t be exhausted in another three or even five games after this one. Bloodlines got an average of 80% in the press, became a golden disk, and was forgotten undeservedly. Compared to the whole setting it is only a tight extract, but it can find its legs easily. In appearance the World of Darkness doesn’t differ from our petty human world. However, inside we find nothing else but creatures of darkness and endless webs of their intrigues. These creatures are leeching on us, humans, or they use us for cover, sometimes they need us for other reasons, so we can feel ourselves safe, more or less. Basic laws of survival are simple: Besides guarding your secrets and keeping your humanity it doesn’t harm to get to know the power structure. Vampires introduced strict regulations on “birth control” and maintaining the principles of hiding in human society, so they are not overpopulating humanity – and because they are small in numbers, they do better keeping their existence in secret. They are not invulnerable, and if every armed organization calls a hunt on them, they won’t last long. Forget garlic, and the stake is causing only some paralysis, it doesn’t end what nature started. They don’t have to sleep in coffin, and they are not sucking common people dry in the alleys. This setting is like Interview with a Vampire‘s (1994.), but in a darker, grimmer and more horroristic tone, dated 2004. Bloodlines basically is a computer role-playing game, and within this category it’s a TPS/FPS action-adventure game dressed in horror elements. Maybe this sounds difficult, but everything is true. It is an action-adventure game, because during character development you are forced to put a few points on combat characteristics. In most of the quests you can tackle your enemies or talk yourself out of the given situations, and it happens that you can avoid combat entirely by sneaking. However, some fights are unavoidable, and certain...

Well, is there anyone who doesn’t know the very entertaining TrackMania series? It never was a really illustrious game, but you could pass some hours/days excellently with it, especially if you could get some friends to it. If you don’t know it, I would like to introduce a fully free episode of the series, called TrackMania: Nations Forever. Before dissection I have to lay down something: This series is not noted for its excellent crash model or simulation of reality. There is no reality, because you can hit any hairpin bend at 200. But reality is not the point – fine game experience and instant action rather is (of course, if you are a fan of simulation, maybe you won’t like it that much, but this is a personal problem – Garcius). As Florent Castelnerac, producer of Nadeo said, they never had planned any tuning option, because simple things are more amusing in themselves. That means you don’t have to start a career (you don’t start from zero), but you can blast right into the middle of the sauce, and prove what you want on a track. 3, 2, 1 AND GOO! The manu is simple, and after setting resolution, sharpness and anything you want, the party is on. You can choose a difficulty setting from White, Green, Blue, Red or Black — evidently Black is the hardest one. And on every difficulty setting there are lots of tracks waiting for you to conquer them. There are around 85-90 (!) tracks in the game. Before starting a race you have to decide what type of medal you want to get: gold, silver or bronze. It is like a second difficulty setting for the given track. I think everyone realized the goal of the game: to be the first who wheels into the finish. Regarding the opponents, soon it will be clear that they are not real but so-called “ghost cars”. Perhaps you cast a questioning glance to the display now and wondering about what can be good in it? Exactly just that: you cannot crash into your opponents, so even bad players don’t have to restart the race after one or two minutes. You...

2014. nov. 13.

Considering that the story connects them tightly, I decided to review the Crystal Dynamics trilogy of the Tomb Raider series in one block. Good and bad can be said about it in the same time, although on the whole I have a mostly pos opinion. There were some moments when I sent allt the developers back into their mothers for nine months, but all’s well that ends well. Over the hills and far away there was a jumpy-crawly style of games that was born in the ancient times. Today’s youngsters mostly doesn’t know what they play in real. In those times saving a princess was enough motivation for starting an adventure, and there were no visual effects and story twists, but platformers came alive and conquered the world.Donkey Kong (1981), Mario Bros (1983) and Prince of Persia (PoP, 1989) haven’t gone out of fashion for thirty years now – at best, some of them were renewed a little. The first Tomb Raider in 1996 had infiltrated this gaming trend, and regarding gameplay it had been similar to PoP. Lara Croft is gifted with the abilities of a goddess, and her first climb-jump-grab-shoot adventure turboed by 3D graphics had been so good that it hadn’t only created a brand, but practically it had renewed the whole platformer genre, and it had made the bed for a heap of other games. I don’t go further into the details of history, beícause I don’t wanna write a book about the advancement of platformer games. The point is; after changing the developer team Eidos released Tomb Raider: Legend (TR:L) in 2006, and it made its way to me. Continually, Anniversary (TR:A) came in 2007, and Underworld (TR:U) in 2008, and these made a complete trilogy with the first installment. They showed Lara Croft as she “leapt in the tiny room” and met her mother, whom she “missed for quite a while.” In the intro video of TR:L Lara’s mom does exactly what is banned and written on every warning sign at ancient ruins nowadays; touches things and takes them from their places. To be more exact, it is a stone sword, or – not incidentally – the key...

I met a guy, someone’s someone, a young one. We talked some, mostly about games, and it turned out, I quote it: “I only played one RPG, Diablo II.” I told him that’s not an RPG, as I know, it was only diversified with a character development system. For this he said, who the f*ck am I to know better? I answered no one, no one, steady on, let D2 be an RPG. That was all. But in real, who am I to tell an opinion? The boy was around sixteen, and I’m playing pen and paper and computer RPGs for seventeen years now. There are approx. 20-22 different role-playing games laying on my shelves with 5-6 strategy games. Some of them are written by my own hand because I just borrowed the originals to translate them for me and my friends. But it is surely more interesting for a Gamedroid-reader that CRPGs were not waiting for long. I was a third grader in high school when I got my first desktop computer, a 286 brought by dad for a piece of homemade salami. It’s display was a small mono Unost television tinkered to be acceptable for the 4-color CGA. Particularly the PC was able to force 16 shades of gray out of this configuration. Well, this stuff saw a lot of interesting thing like STUNTS and POP 1-2, besides such curiosities as Ultima IV, Death Knights of Krynn and at least two parts of the Eye of the Beholder series. So, maybe there are some basic experience behind my opinion. Well, this is enough from the whining framed introduction. Let nostalgia come. Richard Garriott counts as the creator of CRPG with a cute little software titled Akalabeth, which was like ten white lines on black background. Like a dungeon crawling with stickmen. Then nine chapters of the Ultima series was developed from this – one of the most popular Ultimas, the fourth one can be found at the Doggies (www.homeoftheunderdogs.net) in a renewed version. I don’t guarantee it works on Win7, but if it does, you can get to know the feeling of Pen&Paper role-playing games from it. Take, for example, that tiny...

2014. nov. 13.

Sometimes the question comes into the geek mind: What may you expect from your favorite genre on the actual level of technology? Then a game comes and by overdoing the expectations it pushes this “actual level of technology” into your face. My favorite genre is CRPG, and in their times I considered these games amazing (not going back to the ancient times of gaming): Baldur’s Gate (1998), Arcanum (2001), Morrowind (2002), Arx Fatalis (2003), Fable (2004), a Gothic 3 (2006), Fallout 3 (2008), and now The Witcher 2. In the end of the 90s, Baldur’s Gate showed us what quality means in the CRPG genre. It has predecessors and successors alike, bot for its complex story and excellent playability made it one of the most popular, and later, one of the most remembered games. The second one on the list, Arcanum was not just only freeing the term of “walkable area”, but it offered a flexible development system and can be proud of the most complex dialog system to date. Unfortunately, it was full of bugs. With its huge world Morrowind too was ranked among the free roam role-playing games (like all The Elder Scrolls series). Its graphics (in its time), its system and story served high quality game experience. In spite of this the unlit world of Arx Fatalis brought the style of dungeon crawling back, but in the same time it showed such a movement-based spellcasting system that didn’t just made us forget the narrowness of caves and tunnels, but it seems as if the experimenter mood behind the idea would be missing from newer games. Fable. We can say Fable contained everything that a CRPG must have regarding social opportunities, and that made it the most stylish game on the world. The next one, Gothic 3 showed an exceptional combat system. For example, I was unable to melee effectively, while my kick boxer friend could easily kill even three foes in the same fight, irrespectively of their level. It was because with arches and range estimation in archery, and quick dodges, step-ins and precise strikes the combat system of Gothic 3 stood relatively close to simulating reality. Of course, if you...