Alright, well this is officially my favorite game now. I've even ignored Call of Duty and Left 4 Dead. Cuz it feels like you're following a big political story as you play this game, plus the awesome active combat.

My new character, which should be my best so far, is a concentrated warrior. Kherjit horse archer style actually, including equipment, despite being a Lady of the Nords. Horse archery is just too fun, and jousting when necessary, which is not something the Kherjits really do, but it takes down enemies fast.

My army is largely cavalry now, despite my original plan of making it pure infantry and archers. That's cuz the Nords declared war on the Kherjits, the most powerful pure cavalry army in the game. I can't win against pure cavalry with only archers... So I had to shift my style. I miss Rhodok Skirmishers and Nobles though. I was working for them in my second character.

It's been a while since I've posted here, cuz Plurk has taken up a lot of my timeline recording online. D: But I still wish to continue blogging cuz this is easier to look back on.

Anyway I've been playing an awesome game by a fairly unknown company recently. It's an offline RPG called Mount & Blade. It's so much fun. I was already excited about it from my friends that started playing it days before me. But when I started playing I got even more interested. The battle system is so unique and intense. You control your swing/attack direction, and also your blocking direction if you choose to fight without a shield (like me). The game also has no magic, so everything is about skill and tactics.

You collect heroes and regular soldiers as an army. Then you choose a faction (if you want to) and ride against your enemies. Or you can spend your time trading and warding off bandits that try to attack you, or rescuing people. Whatever.

I've personally chosen to have an army of cavalry and archers. It seems to work out great so far. I've fought against armies that are twice the size of mine and come out victorious with minimal losses. I fought against 90+ with an army of 46, and only lost 3 crossbowmen and had about a dozen wounded. The other army was completely obliterated (70+ casualties and the rest are wounded) AND I captured the noble in command.

It's so much fun. :D I'm actually excited to go home to play again. Unfortunately I have a night class. Just for tonight. So I can't play tonight. But the good news is I can go home early tomorrow. I can catch up on some much needed sleep AND play after/before that. :D

Lastly, it's also easy to mod, it seems. It runs off what the Python programming language. Eventually I'll try to learn how to use it and make some adjustments myself.

I realize I haven't posted in a while. I keep thinking I would, like at the workplace or at home during the weekends, but I keep forgetting when I actually get to my PC. That or I become lazy. But here it is now.

A couple weeks ago I finally got the installer of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 back. It's still as awesome as I remember it. But I got too used to the arcade mechanics of CoD4. So it took me a good hour or so to try to get the hang of it again.

Anyway I finally got all the weapons unlocked and I'm really enjoying just wiping out terrorists in Terrorist Hunt. It's just enjoyable. And some of the Terrorist Hunt maps are really challenging. And you can't exactly design a "perfect plan" for any map, cuz they always have the terrorists in different places each time. :D

Also this week we got Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete. Another awesome game that we loved for years and years, and still do. One of the best non-real-time strategy game ever made. I'll make and playtest maps and post them here just for fun.

Also I'm thinking of getting Day of Defeat: Source but the CDs are surprisingly expensive here in the Philippines. It's supposed to be at around US$10.00 overseas, but here it's more like US$60 or so. Possibly because of the shipping/import costs. I dunno. I'll try to find a cheaper one. DoD was one of our favorite games ever.

Aside from still playing Granado Espada, I recently acquired Koei's PC version of the game Warriors Orochi. Koei is responsible for the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games. And guess what Warriors Orochi is! That's right, it's a crossover of the two games. So we're tossing logic and history out the window for this one, and just enjoying another thousands-of-enemies-against-you game.

It has many of the elements that made Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors successful, and a little more. The most prominent one is the tag team style system, where you can switch three characters around during the battle. It doesn't make any sense (I wish they jumped in instead of transforming into the other character), but hey, it's still fun. Makes interesting combos too. If you'd ever seen Tekken Tag or Capcom's VS games, it's similar in concept (except in Warriors Orochi the characters don't jump in, like I stated earlier).

There's also an elaborate weapon fusion system where you can empower your character's weapons with various extra abilities to make them more powerful. You can even give powerful weapons to characters you've never levelled up before, so that when you do finally decide to level them up, it'll be easier.

One thing this game lacks that I kinda miss from DW4, which I loved, is the officer creation system. :( Why can't we make our own officers anymore? That was really cool. Also you only get two costumes per character here (as opposed to DW4 six costumes). But oh well.

All in all, the game is still epic fun, and takes up a lot of my free time these days. I've finished all the stories and unlocked all the stages. I'm about to unlock the last 3 characters later today. We'll see how that turns out. :D

I understand this is another review of an old-ish game, but I might as well write one on it since it's actually my first time to play this game.

So anyway the last time I ever played an R6 game was Rogue Spear, which was obviously years and years ago. So upon getting a taste of the new(ish) Vegas look and feel, not to mention all of the new features and functions, I suddenly felt like all other FPS games are lacking. And that includes Battlefield 2, which is one of the best and most realistic of all FPS games today, in my opinion.

Anyway, what makes Vegas cool isn't necessarily the realism or even the immersiveness. It's not necessarily immersive because there are times when you can see your character in third-person view (particularly when taking cover). It's kinda like a cross between Battlefield and Gears of War, I'd say. It mixes arcade-ish tactics with realism in a strange way that seems to work.

I know a lot of people dislike Vegas, but I have to say, if I stop thinking of it as a faithful R6 game, it's a really fun game that can have you absorbed in it for hours. I literally have to pry myself away from the computer when I play for too long. Even just Terrorist Hunt mode is very exciting.

My main complaint is showing the third-person view of the character when in take cover mode, and the fact that they don't have as many guns as they did back in Rogue Spear. They don't even have basic spec ops/SWAT/military guns like M4's, M16's, and MP5K PDW. That made me a little sad, but I'm told there may be a few mods here and there for that. I haven't done any searching yet, but I'm hoping it's true.

Haven't played enough yet to give any ratings. But so far so good. It's a really exciting and enjoyable game.

So, given the realistic timescale, I had the luxury of traveling around and visiting taverns. Let's just say, I was a little bored one Oblivion day, and looking for some comedy. So I saved and closed the game, set it up to open in a smaller window, and popped up my list of NPC form IDs for summoning via the console on the side.

I found myself a nice tavern in Leyawiin (I think it was Leyawiin? I don't even remember lol), locked the doors via the console, so no one comes in, no one goes out. With tweaks to their HP (giving them each 65535 hp, though you really can give them more than that), I started a tavern brawl, as seen below:


At first it was just me and the innkeeper punching each other, while the other NPCs just watched in horror. That alone was already funny. But I felt it would be funnier if somebody else knocked the innkeeper at the back of the head while we were fighting, like you often see in mindless bar fights in movies. So I popped in a few more NPCs. Random ones. As you see in the image, there's three Argonians, there's a Fallen Knight of the Thorn, a Genghis (never even run into one in the game yet), and a bandit. The innkeeper might be one of the Argonians. The bald dude on the right and the other Argonians were probably the others in the bar when it started.

So anyway, the NPCs started rumbling, and I had nobody to fight, suddenly. So I stood back and took that screenshot, laughing along the way. Though I did feel rather lonely since they completely ignored me.

So I decided it's time to add more NPCs!

Into the fray, I tossed in a nun (a Sister Phebe Jeanard; top middle), another bandit and some random NPC (both not seen in this screenshot, or any other screenshot). It was pretty chaotic, and I regret not taking more screenshots, especially in flying camera mode.

So finally in the chaos, whilst I still laughed, I decided to toss in a guard. Surely, a man of the law could break up this insanity!

(Unfortunately I had no screenshot of after I summoned him.)

Instead of bringing peace to this insane tavern, the guard jumped right in and started attacking the nun. Of all the people lol. After about 20 minutes of me watching the whole mess, sitting back, I checked on their HPs, and nobody even had any HP lower than 55,000 yet. Wow they did slow damage lol. I guess they were more in it for the thrill of the fight rather than just putting their enemies down.

So yeah, after that big brawl, I reloaded and went about my way content.

Several years ago, an insanely popular game called Morrowind hit the markets, and pretty much everybody I knew that was into PC games, especially RPGs, was raving about it, except me. I never got to play it. I didn't even have a computer good enough (at the time) to play it.

Suddenly I find myself with the new Elder Scrolls game called Oblivion. And I can safely say that I really missed out. Oblivion is so much fun, and yet some people say that Morrowind was better in some aspects. Though I don't intend on playing Morrowind soon, I'm still enjoying myself in Oblivion. This is a true open-ended RPG, and especially with the addition of the right mods, you can do almost anything you want.

I can't explain too much of what makes it fun, except that it's pretty much a fantasy world where you can do stuff you wouldn't dare or are otherwise impossible in real life. Want to go into a dark, watery cave and fight goblins? Go ahead. Want to run into a pack of bandits on a dark forest trail and single-handedly take them all down? Sure! Want to go hunting for deer or bears with a bow and arrow? What's stopping you?

I'll probably be playing this game for a long time until I'm able to get a lifetime subscription to LotR Online or something.

First off, NWN2 is very interesting. I have the expansion with me, but I figure I'll finish the main game story first before I play the expansion.

So I picked an elven monk as my main character. I actually started with a rogue, and tried a bunch of other classes, too. But the elven monk was so interesting as I kept playing that I stuck with it, and now it's the only one that's progressed enough.

So anyway, first off, NWN2 wasn't really what I expected. I have to say at first I found it to be rather boring and somewhat annoying. I was a little frustrated and lonely because I got too used to MMORPGs where you have a lot of buttons to press while fighting. NWN2, being a D&D game, relies more on passive effects and luck (dice rolls, after all). You don't actively dodge that trap, you have reflex saves for that. I mean, there's definitely buttons to press in D&D, especially if you choose classes that have micromanagement, such as warlock or even druids. But, it's still not the same as MMORPGs, in a way that I can't seem to properly explain through words. I guess it's just that you don't feel much of the combat action here in NWN, like you're just watching two ants fighting each other...

... That is, until you get the more awesome equipment in the game. When I got my hands on some of those unidentified things I found in some dungeons, I wasn't sure if I wanted to have them identified. I was very poor, after all, only having something like 400-something gold due to my neutral lawful alignment. So I decided to save the game and have 1 or 2 items identified, for 100 gold each. Lo and behold some of them turned out to be pretty valuable. Amongst some of the items I got were a hammer called Storm +1 and other elemental equipment, which do extra damage and have flashy effects.

Suddenly battles became more interesting. And it's not really just because of the flashy effects and stuff. I'm an oldschool RPGer, and I used to play pen & paper and chat RPGs where you actually have character sheets and have to roll dice and stuff. But I never really appreciated the value of equipping the right items in such a thing until I saw how effective the Storm +1 was against all those undeads. So suddenly I'm excited to collect different kinds of equipment for different occasions, and I want to see all of that pre-battle preparation work out.

All in all, so far, despite quite a few bugs, I'm really happy with NWN2. Is there room for improvement? Lots. But it's still fun. I can't wait to finish the story and see just how open-ended it really is.

No rating yet until I get to try out some more stuff.

Okay first off, Abby, my beloved sister, is in Hong Kong now on a business trip. Because of that, we ended up buying a bunch of stuff for the PC, including a webcam and a mic. And I also bought for myself a PS2-style gamepad. I'm pretty happy about all these little upgrades to my PC. :D I was thinking of buying a new keyboard to make the whole thing look cool, but I couldn't find a good keyboard that wasn't expensive. At least, I didn't look too hard, cuz I might find something I really like and find out it's really expensive or something. o_o

So anyway, because of the new gamepad, I've been looking around for games that I already have that can use it. Currently it's just Madden NFL '08, which plays awesomely better with a gamepad (heck even my punting/kicking is lots more accurate), and Dynasty Warriors 4.

In other news, I also finally started playing Neverwinter Nights 2. It's a pretty cool game. I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's hard to get the hang of it because I'm too used to MMORPGs. For example, I'm not used to reading it like a MUD/oldschool tabletop RPG, where you're talking about die rolls instead of percentages, and waiting for your turn to happen instead of just attacking whenever you can.

Anyway I'm thinking of getting a flight sim or something to make use of the gamepad's sticks. I feel like some of its features are wasted on fighting games and Madden. I bet even a driving game would benefit from the subtleness of the control sticks.

Well I finally got my hands on a Madden game, and it's the latest one at that. As far as I know, Madden is the best in the NFL video game business, and has been since the old days of 16-bit graphics. So I was pretty excited about getting this game.

And with good reason. Almost everything is done so well. Graphics are nice, plays are pretty good, and when you're playing you really have to pay attention to the smallest things, which makes American football the great game that it is (unlike in some other games where you only have to pay attention to whoever has the ball). You get points for being a good blocker, or if you're on defense, even putting pressure on the quarterback even if you don't get a sack or anything. That's awesome because it makes you really feel the gravity of all your hard work fighting through the offensive linesmen so you could put a hand in that quarterback's face or make him pass just a split second earlier than he wanted to. These things are priceless in real games, but you never really felt it much in video games, until now.

I only have two major things that I didn't like too much about it and that's it. My first complaint is that, considering it's John Madden, he's not very talkative at all. What he does have is a lot of repetitive lines, especially if the same things happen over and over. And honestly, in a football game you probably want to stick with like 8-10 plays on offense and only a few kinds of plays on defense, like 2 plays for each type of cover/blitz, so that means Madden says the same things a lot. I was actually expecting to hear more exciting commentary, even if it's just the trademarked Madden pointing-out-obvious-stuff. Additionally there are long stretches at times when he doesn't say anything at all. It feels empty really.

The other concern I have is that the game didn't translate too well into keyboard/keyboard+mouse control. The game probably plays extremely well when using controllers (especially PS2 style, with the non-analog sticks and stuff). But when you're using a keyboard+mouse set-up, for example, there are some things you just can't do. For example, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to perform a juke move in keyboard/keyboard+mouse control. If you're using a controller with a stick, you simply flick the stick to the direction and that's it. When you're using keyboard+mouse, it's supposed to be hold left mouse button + move it left, but nothing happens. I feel like I need to buy a controller now, as a result.

Otherwise it's an awesome game. Lots of fun modes including setting up situations, for practice etc.

My rating: 90/100 (one of the best sports games I've ever played)

I started playing a fun guitar-based rhythm game called Frets on Fire. It's designed to be played by picking up your keyboard (like a guitar). Ideally you'll want to press the Function keys (F1-F5 by default, but I changed it so I press F5-F9 instead), and hit a pick key (Enter/Shift by default, but I changed it to the numpad 0 and numpad 7).

The game only starts out with three songs, but you can download a lot of songs on various fan sites, or make some yourself. It's a lot of fun, and it's a good excuse to listen to some of the classics of guitar history, such as Sweet Child of Mine, which is my current LSS. I'm also looking for more Deep Purple songs.

Last Wednesday I got a copy of Battlefield 2 and its expansion, Battlefield 2: Special Forces. After patching it to its latest version (for co-op mode) I found that this is like several times better than Battlefield 1942, which was already an awesome game that I could play it for hours and hours. And today I just got Need for Speed: Carbon.

Silly me for thinking that I have no time for more offline games. I mean, I still play Dynasty Warriors 4, we just got the old Day of Defeat beta 3.1 working again, and I'm also running my offline private server of Lineage 2 (and Frank got to play on it a bit last night). And even with that, I still semi-actively play the online game Space Cowboy Online, which is the only online game I've been reduced to as of now. I mean, surely I should have no more time for more offline games, right?

Wrong. Sadly.

What makes it sad is that I can't give myself more play time. I think I already play too much as it is. If anything I should be cutting down on play time. So the only reasonable solution is cutting the play time for each and spreading myself thin. So I'm left hanging and clambering for more whenever I play, especially the new games.

Now, you may be thinking: why is this guy just now talking about these games that came out like 1-2 years ago? Well until about July, I was only into online games. Particularly MMORPGs. I have several blog entries on how frustrated I am that I can't find a MMORPG that suits my tastes to at least 50%. And even if I do find one, it turns out to being a game I don't enjoy too much because it forces you to spend like 16 hours a day playing (possible when you're a bum, impossible when you're trying to prove you aren't one).

So let me talk just a little bit about both games right now. Let's start with Battlefield 2 and its expansion.

First I was stunned by all the new features. Grappling hooks, sensible medics, wonderful A.I. including squad-based tactics, and well-built maps with lots and lots of places to hide, and alternate routes to go so that you aren't forced into a big firefight all the time.

Second, it's visually stunning. I mean that. If you play with a headset (it has nice audio, as always) and a nice monitor + a machine able to handle high graphical settings, it can almost blur into reality at a squint, like you're watching a movie. The feel of lying helpless after you've been incapacitated by bullets, calling for a medic. You still hear bullets ricocheting nearby, and some whizzing above you. A grenade goes off somewhere in the distance. Suddenly a medic shows up and picks you up. You realize you're not dead yet, as your vest stopped the bullets. So you get back in the action. Seconds later, your medic is shot in the head, and you end up having to fire on 5 or 6 infantry including one sniper. If you weren't dead yet then, you probably will be now.

They captured all that properly.

Next, Need for Speed: Carbon. I was already a fan of NfS: Underground 2, and I'd missed out on playing NfS: Most Wanted. So when I learned that Carbon is even more terrifying than the other two, I felt obliged to play it.

And the wait has paid off. I'd just finished playing it for about an hour, before writing this entry. And it was awesome. Motion blur makes it feel a little realistic, though I couldn't say for sure because I've never driven a car at over 90 km/h. Not that I could even if I wanted to, in this urban traffic scene.

So anyway, as much as I didn't like the idea of being an underground racer having to always keep an eye out for the cops (who incidentally do chase you and try to take you down), my first car chase with cops on my tail (or second, rather, as when you start the game, you're forced to get into an easy cop chase) turned out to be extremely exhilarating. Considering how rusty I am on playing a high-speed racing game, I hadn't gotten completely accustomed yet to driving, so trying to get away from like 5 squad cars proved to be a bit of a problem. Finally after I think 15 minutes of chasing and causing their cars to crash into walls and stuff, I got away and hid in a parking lot. When it was over, my heart was beating and I was almost laughing. It was a pretty good experience.

Contrary to what people might think, though, it doesn't inspire me to become an underground racer and break traffic rules and want to total police cars. In fact, after that experience, it did the opposite. I want to be careful and never ever have to get in such a situation in real life. D: I guess if I want the excitement of the chase, I can always get it in the game. Cheaper, and nobody gets hurt. :D