JulioBiason.Net

It seems that a lot of press today about a Wii weather channel for Wii web browser and there are a lot of user comments saying how useless it will be (something around the lines of “who will get outside while playing”).

But the channel can open a brand new type game experience. Imagine that you are playing some game that replicates a known city (like the “GTA” series did). Now, using the weather channel, they could replicate the weather conditions of the city they are copying. Also, using the user’s selected channel (with city) some games could appear with the same weather of the user. In this case, I could see the Pokemon series using this to select which type of pets would appear (water-types only when it’s raining, fire and rock-type only when it’s not raining, ghost-types when it’s foggy and so on). Of course, if there isn’t an internet connection, they would have to resort to some “random” check.

Well, only if consoles pick up with computers…

Finally, some flash game with a geek tone: QWERTY Warriors. Enemies appear in the screen and you have to kill them by typing the words below them.

After a week playing the second expansion of Guild Wars, “Nightfall”. This expansion sets the story in the continent of “Elona”, in a place that looks like Africa and Egypt. Two new classes were added: “Dervish”, a scythe welding warrior, using wind magic to freeze enemies and “Paragon”, spear welding rangers, with holy attacks. In a way, dervishes are a mix of warrior and elementarist and paragons are rangers with monks, although there are no reused skills.

Another addition to this expansion are the heroes. Heroes are mercenaries-like NPCs: you can carry them on your missions and they will help you on your quests. The difference is that you can carry your heroes between quests and missions and select their skills. They presence also adds another deep into PvP games: since you can “buy” skills to your heroes, you open those skills to PVP characters. So you don’t need to build a warrior in the roleplaying mode to get the skills to play on PvP, a single warrior hero will help you get those skills.

Also, coupled with the heroes, you can now give them simple orders. You can select the type of behavior as attack, making them attack every enemy in the nearby area, guard, only attacking enemies when they attack the team first and do not attack, when they stay in the back of the team and do not engage any battles. Another kind of action is move: you can order single heroes to move to a location or the whole group, including the henchies. Once they move to the location you pointed, they will respect their selected behavior: attack, guard or simply sit there like a duck.

As in “Factions”, the first expansion, you start in an island and have to perform certain missions to get the chance to go to the main land. Differently from the the previous expansion, you don’t hit level 20 too fast. It seems that the developers decided to increase the ladder of experience decline over level. In your first levels, killing enemies give you a lot of experience. But, when you hit around level 10, the experience decreases a lot, so killing the same group over and over again is less rewarding over time. But you can still kill them to get promotion points. Those promotion points don’t give you much, except give you titles like “Sunspear commander”, “Sunspear sargent” and so on. I still don’t know if that affects the number of heroes you can take with you.

About the quests: the first quests and missions are quite straight forward and really nice. You manage to explore the whole island simply following the initial quests. Then, when you have explored the whole island, the quests start to suck. Quests that spawn over several districts, quests that requires that you move back and forth and stupid NPCs that you have to guide over the map that insist in getting in your front, preventing you to go straight or managing to get killed before getting in the end of the quest: you choose. Sometimes, more than one of the previous problems happen at the same time.

I’ve saw people complaining about bugs. I didn’t saw any problems while playing (except those listed above), but it seems the people at Arena Net are listening to players and fixing those bugs.

If you consider that Factions had a worst start, Nightfall seems to go to a good play.

It’s been a long time since I talked about GuildWars. Well, this is an update:

Today GuildWars entered a “Halloween” special event. Every three hours, Mad King Thorns would appear, make some jokes, ask people do do some emotes and tell some stupid stuff. After each conclude action, you get a “ghost-in-a-box” (a box that makes a ghost appear right in front of up, but disappears after a short time), witch’s brew (a potent alcoholic beverage, turns the screen red and add some waves to the image), absinthe (add some green flames to your char, turn the screen green and add some blur), squash serum (add some pumpkin image around your char head) and transformation tonic (turn your char into a corn candy or something like that). All those tricks took 30 minutes to complete. In the end, you get a pumpkin head if you are in Lion’s Arch and a wicked hat if you are in Kamandan.

Also, all NPCs in Lion’s Arch and Kamandan turned into monsters, pointing it as a joke of Mad King. New NPCs appeared as collectors, changing random items to some of those above items. As I’m trying to get the title of “Drunkyard” by staying drunk for 1000 minutes, and witch’s brew being so strong (just two bottles would make your char drunk). One of those collects wanted just two “glowing hearts”, an item dropped by “fire imps”, who stay just right next to the door to Lion’s Arch.

So, my day consisted of: 30 minutes listening to Mad King and two hours and half running after fire imps, changing glowing hearts into witch’s brew and getting drunk.

Just one problem: Kamandan is a city in the Nightfall series, released recently, which I didn’t have. “Didn’t” because, trying to get the wicked hat, I bought it. Now I own the three parts of the game and can go anywhere in this universe. So far, I can say that the new universe is bigger than the previous installments (anything would be bigger than Cantha, the area of “Factions”). There are two new classes: Paragon, a leader with skills to boost a whole group at once and Dervish, warriors with long scythes. I’ve created a new Derverish and it is really worth: they start with abilities like hitting more than one enemy with just one swing. Oh, and the new campaign has this African/Egyptian theme.

So, that’s it. New pictures soon.

Ok, I must admit: I’m hooked on Guild Wars. More than I should, I suspect. It is not the game itself, but the people playing it. I recall when I joined my current Guild, The Devious Devils: one of the members was just asking if someone would like to join the Guild, I asked if I could join and there I was. Simple as that. And, better yet, no matter how newbie my questions may be, people don’t complain about it: they are always answer the questions, and don’t seem bothered by doing it so, a completely different behaviour from the people playing bRO.

Last night, trying to finish a quest, I found that you can really find people willing to role play: I had a hard quest in hand, tried it already three times, dying on some spot. On Guild Wars, your only penalty for dying is losing morale, which brings your stats down for a while, with a maximum of -60%; returning to an outpost puts your morale back to normal. So, this group of complete strangers did try the complete the same quest, dying over and over again. Every time, the fighter keep dropping small jokes to keep real live moral up. Even the other Necromancer keep joking when she died, like “Hm… ground. Tastes so good.”

In the end, we all had -60% morale and where dying very quickly to some hunters. Then, suddenly, I decided to stop trying to kill everything and get the damn quest object. So, under heavy fire, I run to the spot and manage to pick it up just before dying. When I checked, I had to tell the others and we came with a plan: two would distract the hunters while the third would pick the quest object. And that worked, even if we didn’t manage to kill any of the damn hunters.

So, it was not just a matter of brute force, we had to have some tactics around. And that was just fun.

Anyway, here are some new shots of the game:

All good names have been taken already And I’m Powers. Austin Powers.

E1lie? She may not think so, you may not think so. But damn, she looks a lot like (well, when she was redheaded, anyway)…

Peter Pumpkinhead And he was banging…

I still didn’t play it enough, but Guild Wars seem very promissing. Right now I have to effective characters: a necromancer/mesmer and an archer. Both female, as the polygons are nicer than male characters. One thing to take care when playing it is actually read what is going on: with the necro, I did just a few “walk to check point, click on NPC with ‘!’ above it” and I got into a hard place very quickly. Only level 4, it is quite hard to keep playing, not to mention that I’ve left a lot of skills behind; I’m not doing the same with the archer and I’m getting more skills with her.

On the skill side, I can point that you don’t get skills by simply getting levels, like on “Diablo”; they are given by some NPCs or bought on others, just like World of Warcraft.

Another nice change is the hit points and mana points (actually, they aren’t called “mana points”, but I can’t recall the name used inside the game, even if the result is the same of mana points): you don’t need to change your character atributes to get more, you simply have to survive as long as you can. Being hit (and healing afterwards) increase your hit points, using skills that require mana points will increase your mana points when you recover them.

As I pointed before, the graphics are simply stunning. But you can’t talk about graphics, you have to see it by yourself:

Guild Wars This is not a pre-rendered screenshot

I’ll post some more as I walk around the game.

Edit 1: Oh, I forgot to mention: the controls are great. I mean, I can play it using only the keyboard and no mouse. And it is not that hard to figure the controls.

I was there, just minding my own business, when someone mentions on some of Planets I read Guild Wars. For those unaware of what it is, Guild Wars is an MMORPG, like World of Warcraft and Everquest. There is a difference, though: World of Warcraft, Everquest, Ragnarök and almost every other MMORPG around requires a monthly fee to pay; Guild Wars doesn’t: all you have to pay is the box and you are free to play how much you want.

So, there again, I decided to check it out. The price is a little bit high on Brazilians standards: US$ 50. And there is no resellers around, but we got the internet and credit cards, right? Anyway, I thought it was a little too much, so I asked what information he had about this game. The information he had said it was a better game than World of Warcraft but, you know, fifty bucks still fifty bucks. So, time to check some screenshots. Yeah, nice. But still… fifty bucks!

So, this morning I decided to track a demo. There isn’t one, the pointed one is actually the game installer. So, there I was, without option to try it except buy the damn game. That’s when I recalled my credit card bill only comes on day 8, so it won’t get next month, and I would have to pay it only on March. That’s it! I’m going to buy the damn thing. And that was what I did.

So far, only a few walks around the city. But the game IS beautiful, there is no way to deny it. Now, let me play a little bit to see if the RPG element in it is good too…

Edit 1: May, the purchase will only appear on May, not March.

Crashday was being promoted, in the very beginning, as the “new Stunts”. But the project development lead to another direction, turning the game more of a modern Destruction Derby. The post of “new Stunts” seems to be free to be taken by Ultimate Stunts.

Anyway, the demo of Crashday was released a few days and I just played it. And I must say it is very impressive. The games features some very detailed and beautiful graphics without killing performance and loads quite fast.

The demo features two kinds of game: wrecking, where you must kill other opponents using a sub-machine and a rocket launcher and stunts, where you must perform some stunts (like high jumping, spinning in the air and such).

The demo also have some movies about other types of games, like longest jump, jump into the check points (kinda like some quests on Grand Thief Auto), get the flag (the players must steal the flag from each other, bumping against themselves), pass the bomb (the reverse, players must hit each other to put the bomb on other players) and just a few more.

The physics engine still needs some works: sometimes, after the game has finished, when the car should be complete still, it got “sliding” sideways, without any indication of external force.

It is fun to play it and it would be a blast when it finally reaches gold (which seems to be January 24!)

Edit 1: launch day is February 24, not January.

Killing Elder Willows is not too hard. They even don’t give you enough exp. But, some times, they can drop something amusing.

One of the drops I got was a wood armor. It is not usable by archers/hunters/bards, so all use I had for it was selling for money. But, when I used the “make arrows” skill, the armour appeared. Just for kill my curiosity, I decided to turn it into arrows. And I got 1000 arrows and 700 iron arrows. Worth.

So, finding wood armours would be a lot more interesting from now on.

It has being a long time since I posted something about Ragnarok. I’m not playing it as I used to do, but I’ve decided to play at least one hour from now on. Today, after a long struggle, I managed to get another level. Here are the stats:

I’m still running over the same place (moc_fild03), still killing Greatest General (thanks Shalimar for pointing the right name :)). I’m not getting a bunch of Exp doing it, but at least I manage to get a lot of brigans and resins, which I can sell for some good money.