Professor Layton returns to us in this fabulous continuation of his puzzle solving and crime busting adventures. And he certainly doesn’t disappoint, with a mysterious murder, a stolen box, and a town shrouded in mystery.
Love, redemption and curiosity fulfilled await us at the end of the journey and it is well worth the effort.
Aion seems to be thriving, the servers are at decent concurrency levels, there aren’t overwhelming server problems, and most players seem genuinely happy with the game. China can’t add servers fast enough and North American and European sales have almost reached a million.
Really it appears that the Aion launch (in North America) was not only successful but also quite smooth. Not something very many MMORPGs can boast. (To be fair, it was also not as large of a lunch as some previous games have been, plus they launched in Korea and China before they did here. Clearly that gave them an excellent opportunity to work out some kinks.)
And though I may be finished with Aion, I’m extremely glad I tried it. Much of my playtime was quite enjoyable. It just turned out to not be for me, which is fine. No game can appease everyone’s needs.
So I’m closing out the Aion book with a proper review. =)
Now a days I tend to avoid scary games. Yet there was indeed a time when I enjoyed them; enjoy may be the wrong description, it was much more: cringed my way through the experience. Yet clearly some part of it was exciting enough to be entertaining.
Resident Evil (the original) was probably the first horror game I played on the console and boy did it scare the shit out of me. The spooky atmosphere in that vast ancient house, monsters dropping on top of you when you least expect it, and every nerve racking moment when nothing happens but you just can’t help expecting something to jump out at you anyway. Plus I got to kick ass playing a girl, which is always a big plus in my book.
Geeky Teen Girl Romance!
As a general rule I tend to pick up anything that involves the words ‘gamer’ and ‘girl’ (or various forms thereof). Those two words have been tough to find in the same paragraph, much less in the same sentence. Clearly the machines that drive capitalism have scented a new market as these words have been showing up together far more often.
Gamer Girl completely capitalizes on the newest trend in geekyness; girls play computer games too! The thing that rankles most about the whole ‘targeted market’ is that the book is merely a standard teen romance novel coated with a layer of geek.
The second expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King (WotFK), graced us with its presents a mere year and ten months after the last expansion. (Woot! Our wait was cut by four months!)
Feature wise, it was very similar to the previous expansion, a new continent to explore, new higher levels to reach, more quests, more dungeons, and more loot. They even added a brand new class to play.
And yet, WotLK has been the more successful expansion. Clearly a lot was learned from the previous two games, because they somehow managed to keep and fine tune features that worked well while weeding out most of the irritating bits.
But not all the features are recycled, loads of new ones joined the frey, seamlessly blending new and old. A few of the most notable additions being: achievements and vehicle-combat.
The Burning Crusade (BC) expansion was release just a bit over two years after the original World of Warcraft MMORPG went live, and boy was it long overdue. While there is no doubt that WoW was a massive achievement (feat of strength?), it was by no means content rich enough to remain engaging for two years.
It certainly didn’t hold my attention as I took a long break before BC came out. In fact quite a few of my friends took breaks at similar times.
But promises of new and more lured me back for The Burning Crusade. Two new races, a whole new continent, new dungeons, and loads of new loot were just some of the features that this expansion boasted.
World of Warcraft has lived up to its name and turned the world of PC gaming into a world of WoW. The most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer role-playing game) to date, boasting over 11 million subscribers (that’s more then the entire population of Switzerland!) and its showing no signs of slowing down as it nears its five year anniversary.
Long have I been a hater of social networking sites. The idea of sharing personal information with the world is completely unappealing. Posting every single detail of ones life, like the need to defecate, or which restaurant is currently being eaten at, is incredibly strange and distasteful to me.
First of all, I don’t really want to know most of that stuff about other people. Second, I am much more interested in living my life then writing about it or reading about someone else living theirs (this is a very similar problem I have with games like The Sims.) And probably most important, I am an intensely private person, sharing is not something I do naturally.
Star Wars and Indiana Jones are integral parts of my childhood and have helped mold me into the person I am today. Despite the strong early years attachment I have to them, they managed to maintain those awe filled memories with sappy nostalgia instead of shattering them into bitter shards of disbelief. (Must be magic!)
Delving into such a precious license can be daunting, as there is a lot of emotional history attached to it.
Lego Indiana Jones masterfully manages to honor the movies and bring some freshness to the story without squashing any nostalgic memory I have.
One of the main reasons that I started with the Lego Star Wars review was to use it as a baseline. Fundamentally, Lego Batman is the same game. Why rehash all their similarities then?
