Token Female Gamer

Mist of Pandaria (MoP) is the latest expansion to the ever popular World of Warcraft Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. With a brand new continent, new playable race and class, new talents for all classes, Pokemon and Farmville, the ever expanding world of Azeroth has gotten just a bit more crowded.

Following a rather extensive WoW break, I dived into Pandaria with tempered enthusiasm. Between the disappointing Cataclysm end game and Pandas becoming the new playable race (Blizzard swore that would NEVER ever happen), I found my expectations understandably depressed.

But now, with a little over four hundred hours under my belt, it’s quite clear that I liked the game better then expected and that a review is far past due.

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Oblivion was quite effective at smothering any desire I might have had to play other Elder Scrolls game. Being the victim of poor character choices and frequently lost in the vast empty abyss that was the world of Oblivion (aptly named) made quitting quite easy and overlooking Skyrim easier still.

But then I finished Mass Effect 3 and found myself pining for something similar, something new. Skyrim seemed like the obvious candidate; though thinking about it now, Dragon Age probably would have been a closer match.

Whatever the case, Skyrim was recommended to me and, thanks to my fabulous friends, loaned to me, since I still couldn’t bring myself to purchase a copy. Seemed like the perfect solution as I expected to dislike the game and return it a week later.

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This must have been an incredibly difficult game to make. What a challenge to create a sequel to Diablo and Diablo 2, two of the most influential Action RPGs of our time. I do not envy them this task; especially considering the original development team was let go. It seems a rather unfair burden to place on an entirely new team.

No wonder the game was so long in development. Between the team changes and the restarts this caused, they probably could have released three games. But then this is Blizzard, which is notoriously slow; two is probably a better estimate. All things considered, I think the team did an incredible job. They released a fairly polished product after all; I just don’t think they made a Diablo Game.

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Sometimes being evil is just plain fun, especially if it’s packaged with humor and limited to mild evil intent. To date my favorite excuse to be (mildly) dastardly has been the game Overlord.

Just like the title suggests, the main playable figure is an evil overlord who commands a hard of goblins to do his bidding. Having lots of sacrificial minions to do all the fighting and heavy lifting is of course one of the big reasons I love this game.

Even though minions get used up and replaced like tissue paper, the burning and pillaging of the nearby town is optional. Which means its possible to be a slightly benevolent evil overlord. Though the humorous goblin sidekick will frown upon showing too much compassion.

Overlord is an incredibly fun game that makes being evil funny and quite entertaining, while not requiring true depravity. This also means that when I did have a few minor slip ups, like accidentally burning a farm to the ground, I didn’t feel too badly about it.

My two runners up are ‘Dungeon Keeper’ and ‘Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles My Life as a Darklord’. Both are tower defense type games that let you play as the evil dungeon master. Build up your dungeon with traps and minions to defend against intruding heroes.

Video game movie adaptations are pretty much universally terrible. Thankfully I really like bad movies, especially since many of these adaptations have crossed that line into ‘so terrible its funny’.

But there are a few that were enjoyable for simply being fun and entertaining. My favorite is probably ‘Tomb Raider’. Angelina Jolie does a great job of being an action star, and I’m always a sucker for an intelligent, kick ass, female heroine. My runners up are ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Resident Evil’.

Let me clarify, these are not great movies, but they still managed to represent their games fairly well and be quite entertaining. Frankly, with the selection of game movies that are out there (~cough~ Dungeon Siege movie ~cough~) these three movies are masterpieces.

The TVtropes site has an interesting write up about why video game movies suck and how animated versions tend to be better received. Well worth a read for deeper insight.

While games don’t seem to adapt as well into other mediums, the opposite direction is often much more successful. Two of my favorites are Lego Star Wars and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Both are super fun games that represent their various genres extremely well.

It’s incredibly difficult to make a sequel better then its predecessor. On the one hand you have the fans that loved the original and any derivation is anathema; while the opposing side demands improvements and beyond, the game must evolve. It’s an almost impossible task that sequels must face.

The most successful sequels in my opinion are ones that make the player forget all about the predecessor, by either being such a huge improvement or by reinventing the entire concept. A small example: Diablo 2 increased movement speed so much that returning to Diablo was painfully slow.

Tomb Raider 2 is a great example of a game that made vast improvements, while still remaining faithful to its antecedent. While it was very obviously a sequel, in that most of the games mechanics stayed the same, most of them were fine tuned to create an even better and more flexible experience. The story was better, the graphics were better, the levels were better, and the guns were better, creating an overall just better game.

Guild Wars 2 is my choice for game sequel that reinvented itself. While it still maintained the look and PvP focus, the game mechanics are vastly different and I think much improved. Guild Wars 2 is simply a far superior game, though still plays as an MMOrpg. They clearly learned from their first effort and decided to try something rather different, which really makes the whole game stand out from the crowd.

This review, like most of them, is long overdue. The delay is mostly owing to my abandoning the game quite early on and thinking I would come back to it. Well, to be honest, requiring myself to come back, since I didn’t feel I had played enough to give it a fair review.

But it’s become quite obvious that I am not going to return and the review will have to happen regardless. Any guilt I had, has been assuaged by the eight months of subscription I have paid for a completely inactive account – its time to be done.

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Yup, today is the big release of Torchlight 2. I may never have time to post again. O_O

Also for anyone who has a bunch of friends (or a big family) there is a 4-pack deal on Steam. Basically you get four copies of the game for the price of three. Really great price. =)

See ya in Torchlight 2, or Borderlands 2, or Guild Wars 2, or some other land of the 2s. =P

Today is the release date of Borderlands 2. Some of my friends have made this an ‘official holiday’, aka staying home sick to play the game. Having not played the first one (its still sitting in plastic on my to play pile) I dont quite understand the need to use up a sick day.

But the developers including Ellie, a character design that goes totally against traditional female stereotypes, certainly peaked my interest. This sort of thinking out of the box with female characters is really something I want to support.

So I will at least try the game. But since I dont really know anything about either game, do I play Borderlands first? Does it matter?

Before the release of Diablo 3, I decided to dust off my old copy of Diablo 2. Seemed like a good way to get ready, plus it is one of my favorite games. After installing and patching, I played a few different characters, that quite promptly got deleted. (On Bnet any character that hasn’t been played for more then two hours gets deleted after ten days.)

Finally got wise and leveled a Necromancer past the cut off. This way I can boot it up to run through a level every now and then (my necromancer is level 11).

Last night while I was waiting for the husband to log in and play D2 with me, I looked in on the chat room. While there wasn’t anything interesting being said, it does give this very handy Bnet update.

I was shocked at how many people were playing Diablo 2. This game is OLD and it still has over 16,000 concurrent users. That just blows my mind.

Makes me wonder if there are other “old” games that a ton of people still play.