Free(?) to Play games

We have a new era: a time of Free2Play gaming. Many games have gone from an subscription model, to premium based option. Has that done us anything good? Are these games worth their "prices" ? Are they playable in their free iterations? I have spent some time during my examination period playing a few Free2Play games. Some that were subscription based, and some Free2Play from the beginning. And I have a few words about them. Stay awhile and...

Slight warning: the links are adf.ly-ied. Now I need EVERY SINGLE PENNY :/

How to fight boredom? With GRINDING!

After my exams, I had a few days filled with extreme boredom. I decided to fill that time with some kind of time consuming game. I thought MMO games are the best choice. Most of them require hours of grinding and questing to gain something really valuable. You need time to achieve something greater. And since I am a quite poor guy, I decided to try out some F2P MMO's. 

I was not suspecting, that finding an interesting one would be SUCH a challenge.

How to become a Jedi in three hours (or with a load of cash)? 

Star Wars: The Old Republic (C) Electronic Arts/Bioware/Lucas Arts

I am quite a fan of Star Wars. I have also completed Knights of The Old Republic 2 with the Restored Content mod (which I highly recommend to anyone who would like to see how this game SHOULD be made) not so long ago. So The Old Republic sounded like a natural choice in my quest to slay boredom before it completely takes me over.

The gameplay? Probably your typical MMO: skill spamming, looting, quests "kill x monsters" or "bring x to y". The story was what set this game apart. Until the MMO features like PvP, grinding and partying "kicked in", I felt that I played an good, story driven cRPG. A little cliched (like all Bioware RPG's since Neverwinter Nights), but still good.

The game was not bad at start, however the F2P limitations were what scared me away from this game. Later, you feel as if all the fun was either limited or restricted until you pay up. Either in a subscription pay, or using the in-game store to unlock some of the content. I dug up an article in a Polish gaming magazine CD-Action. An journalist counted, that buying all the perks you get in the monthly subscription via the store would cost you almost THREE times the cost of subscription. So beware of the shop. 

The most annoying thing in F2P is that some of the quest awards are locked for non-subscribers. The moment my dreamed lightsaber was locked away from me because I can't afford 15$ a month I regrettably deleted this game from my hard drive and moved on.

Odin goes to Atlantis and fights with Greek gods (or something like that)

War Of Immortals - a typical(?) Berserker. (C) PWE

Perfect World Entertainment has a long story of producing Free 2 Play games. In search of something new, I came across War Of The Immortals. Once again, the story has seduced me: with it's weirdness. We have a mixture all the myths I can recall from my school years: Greek, Nordic, Asian. Name what you want.

Since we got specialits in F2P here, you can see that. There aren't any P2P locations or quests in this game. You can however increase the number of times you can do a daily quest, but you can always do it at least once, even without payments. 

The ingame store has many items (both packs and single ones). These include both powerful weapons (that give you an edge in PvP and Player vs. Enviroment and purely cosmetic items. However, for the whole time I spent in this game, I have not felt worse than someone that was paying. That's a huge plus for this game.

In game is quite peculiar, mostly the graphic style, and point of view, which is different than most new MMO games (since this game is from ~2010, it's not so surprising). Since that, before you try it, take a look of the gameplay video made by MMOHut

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Conan the King, and a (non-Protoss) dark templar.

Conan The King, sitting and thinking... (C) Funcom

Another game turned F2P, after the owners decided, that they can make more money by loosing up the leash. I probably would never tried it, if not it recent arrival on Steam.
Hail to Age Of Conan: Unchained. And by Unchained I mean not not P2P. Of course, there is still a subscription option, and a in-game store. They have to earn their pennies somehow.
Based upon one the best known dark fantasy novels, this game lives up to it. The world is bad, and wants to eat you alive. There are no good fantasy creatures. No Elves to help you with advice or magic artifacts, no Dwarves to build or swing axes like madmen. Only monsters to eat you alive. And before you meet them, you need to beat down some crocodiles and pygmies. Also break down those shackles on your hands. They don't let escaped slaves into towns. Especially those, who killed their owners ;)
Here, the transition from P2P to F2P went the best way: the only hurting limitation non-subscribers get is the character slot limit: you can have only 2 at a time. But have no fear, you can increase that number using the in game shop. Also, the gameplay content is mostly open, with an exception of a expansion called "Rise of The Godslayer" which is, in most part, only for premium players.
However, that's where the pain ends. You can achieve most things in the game, with time alone. Or money, if you want to buy it. But, in my opinion, earning is better than buying. It gives you a sense of pride about what you had accomplished. And that cannot be taken away :)

TL;DR

To sum up everything I wrote here:

 Free2Play MMO's are something like THIS!

But they are still fun to play. Some just don't give enough fun to make non players happy. They try to lure players into subscribing. Or buying more or less necessary things in their in game stores. Some make such investments an necessity to have a good playthrough, like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some just ask for a few spare coins for their hard work, as Age Of Conan does. But it all depends on the player: on what world he wants to travel, and how much he can pay up to do so.

CONTEST:

The next post I will write will be a review of an MMO game which is funded completely by supporters and cosmetic microtransactions. If you know the title of the game, then write it's title in a comment to this text. The first person to answer correctly will get a Steam key for Darwinia. 

Compilation of announcements

Greetings to all my readers, I hope you missed me. I can tell you for sure, that I missed writing! D

I did not have time to post anything because of my examination period, but now, it has FINALLY ENDED! HUHUHU! :D YEAH! Huray, and etc. So I will come back to posting asap, with the first one coming tomorrow/tonight.

Here, have a cookie as an apology!

Also, the sad news: my laptop is damaged, and can't withstand longer periods of gaming... So the number of PC game reviews will go down, and in their place will come reviews of Android and Flash games. I also plan to write a thing or two about gaming in general.

So stay tuned, everything will be fine :D

A month has passed: General blog info

It has been a month since I woke up and decided  to start making a blog about video games. Because so much time has passed, I decide to write a few things about myself. In case you want to understand how this came to life, than read on.

First, a bit of info about me:
I am a 21 year old student of journalism and social communication from Poland. My hobbies except gaming are reading, playing around with computers, security systems, rock music and spontaneous strolls. Except for that I am very lucky to have a beloved girlfriend, which made the mascot of this blog :) You can see more of her art here :)

Why this blog exists?
Because I have a manical need of writing. This catastrophe was created by my studies, and because I need to write SOMETHING, I decided to write about one of the few things I love to do :)

Why in English, since I am from Poland? Because more people use English. And since that I can get loads of feedback. And I can also train my English skills, which have gotten a bit rusty lately :/

Something about my pc and used apps. 
All the games I play and review are run on my trusty Dell Studio 1555 laptop. The specs are:
Intel Core2Duo 2GHz
3GB DDR2 Ram
ATI Radeon HD4570

The rest is not all that important. For now it serves me well, but I will be trying to make a stationary PC by myself "soon". Probably not that soon since I am pretty low on cash :X
To record gameplays I use FRAPS and Camstudio OSS.

Now some blog stats: 
Up to the uploading of this post I had 723 visitors, mostly from the USA, United Kingdom and Poland.
The blog itself exists for exactly a month, so I think it's not bad. Especially I don't have a clue about page positioning, so Google can't find me xD'''
From the 10 blog posts I have published, the most read one was the "Indie Game Spotlight vol. 1" with a whooping number of  120 entries. Thanks for that :D

I hope this entry shed some light on the backstory behind this blog. Anyway, don't worry, I am still going to write. And I hope it will be interesting for you to read :)

Next blog entry E.T.A: end of January, after my college exams :X

Yeti's Online Review: AirMech

Welcome again in year 2013! How was your New Year's Eve? :D I hope you were enjoying it as much as I did :) So here we go with the first post in the year 2013 :D

Have you ever wanted to commander an mech? One of those enormous robots, probably armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction? Recently, I came by an game, which allowed me to do so. It's  the open beta of AirMech, brought to us by Carbon Games.

This game is an online only title. Mostly because of it's genre: it's a Massive Online Battle Arena. Or, as most people prefer, MOBA for short. Yes, I know, I haven't seen an Sci-Fi MOBA myself. But there always has to be a first time. So, after installing it on Steam (mostly because the premium content was discounted on the main page, but that will be later), and updating the game, I could start playing almost at once. 

CUSTOMIZATION AND PRE-GAME.

Before we start, I need to write a tiny bit of info. The game is not a Steam-exclusive title. It is also available as an standalone client available for download at the Carbon Games website , and, what was a large surprise: as an chrome app. Which theoretically means that you can play it on any operating system that has access to Google Chrome An added bonus to the latter is the ability to unlock a very funny Chrome skin for one of your mechs.

Now an quick scan to see the champions/characters/or in this case: mech classes to be available  We have a rather small selection of SEVEN mech types to choose. 

A rather small choice, when we compare to the 100+ champions to pick from League Of Legends or DOTA 2, but remember: not everyone likes fantasy. That, however is not the end of available customization. To understand what I mean, we need to quickly overview the gameplay twists compared to other, more cliche MOBA games. The objective in most games is simple: take out the enemies HQ while not letting them do the same to you. The major twist is that you can't do it alone. More: you won't handle the enemy even if you go with your whole team into the fray. You need to additionally produce some units of your own, and transport them to the battlefield (every mech can carry an set number of units, depending on the size of the unit)

The units types available is not set in stone, you can use the in-game store to gain the ability to build other types of units. Most of the options are variations of the early available units, so you can handle well by using the units available to you at the start. Or you can use the other options to adjust the units to be more appropriate to your playstyle. I have not seen any units that can be called overpowered/underpowered. And that is a large plus to this game. With an amount of unit types being more than 50, you can have a largely customized force on the battlefield. And even more, some of the units are blasting fun (yup, I meant the creeper :D )

GAMEPLAY

Okay, enough with the preparations, let's go to action! We have three types of matches available: Survival, Normal Match and Capture the Flag. The first one is an classic, not in this genre, but in general: 9 rounds of increasingly tougher opponents attack your base, and you need to stand firm against the onslaught.  It can be played both Solo, and in CO-OP mode with up to four players. Even through most games with this type of gameplay are easy, you can't say so in AirMech. It's an real slaughter, and requires loads of skills and cooperation from the team to succeed. Otherwise... well, you can always try :) The normal match is the classic one from the genre: two teams, two bases, last base standing shows which team wins. The major difference between AirMech and other MOBA's is the ability to capture bases on the map. These bases act as spawn points for your units and constantly generated "creep" units, that just go forward towards to enemy base, trying to tear it apart. Also, the match is divided into a few segments, that are depended on the time that has passed. Each time a phase changes, the strength of creeps, or your AirMech increases. After an insane amount of time passes, the match goes to overtime, and the teams main bases start to take damage depending on the amount of bases the enemy controls. So there is no way for a match to take forever, which is GREAT. Same thing as above, you can play 1vs1, 2vs2, both with or without other players (but I have to warn you, the AI seems to be in VERY EARLY BETA, it's not even trying to be challenge).  About CTF.... Each base has a "flag". You need to fly to the opponents base, catch it, and bring it back to your HQ WHILE YOUR FLAG IS STILL THERE. It's an quite awesome mode, but a little too fast-paced  especially when you see how fast you can go in this game :X

Now, going to the gameplay itself: it's really action-packed, and most of the time feels more like an online shooter, with a peculiar perspective. You can all see it down below, a recorded randomly played match.

As you can probably see on the movie above, not everything is perfect. The AI sometimes acts in totally random order, or stops moving right beside your defensive turrets. Other than that, the game suffers from random lag spikes and FPS drops. Yup, I play on a low-end PC, but the same problem can be seen on my friends Intel i5 and a brand new graphic card, so these are definitely not our fault. It's all because it's still an beta.

Even through, it's still more than playable. Also it's quite the opposite of other MOBA games. There is a larger focus on strategic thinking and making long term plans. But you also need reflexes and skills gained from playing shooters, be it FPS, TPS, or anything else. You don't have to be that dexterous to play DOTA 2 or League of Legends.

So tl;dr:

• if other MOBA games are too slow for you: play AirMech
• if you are a mech freak: play it
• if you watched too much Transformers in your childhood: give it a shot
• if you love to compete with other people: go for it
• if you are not afraid of being a guinea pig: just do it
• in case off frequent internet downtimes: avoid it
• you prefer playing vs. AI? then you should go play anything else (even Minesweeper is now better)

Yeti's Indie Spotlight: Pokemon 3D.

Now come on: I don't have to write what Pokemon is, right? Everyone will know a pokeball when they see one. Most people at least heard about Pikachu, or Ash. And one thing is sure: every gamer has at least heard about the Pokemon games for every Nintendo console. Pokemon Red, Green, Gold, Sapphire, Stadium... At least some of them.

And because of that, I think all of us should get some info on this indie game. Made by an 18 year old guy. And it's a starting point for a Pokemon trainer's dream: Pokemon 3D

IN CASE IN NOT LIKING TO READ, skip to tl;dr
FOR AN MORE "UP TO DATE" VERSION CLICK HERE: Yeti o Grach - Pokemon 3D

Pokemon 3D Main Menu

The easiest way to describe this game is an FPP adaptation of Pokemon Gold and Silver for PC. You can see that from the first couple seconds of gameplay. A majority (if not all) of the gameplay is taken straight from the original Pokemon games. However, that is not an con. The same mechanics, with some tweaks, are the workhorse of Pokemon games since 1998.

When you click new game, you get the classical question: "What is your name?" asks Professor Oak, the introducing character from Pokemon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow. WAIT, WAIT, WHAT? Should there be someone else there? To be honest, I thought it should be Professor Elm in here, but I am not 100% sure after these few years I played Pokemon Silver/Gold.

But enough of my writing, first see some in-game action on the gameplay below. BE WARNED, IT'S QUITE LONG.

At first we entered Professor Elm's Lab, to get a Pokemon. I have not paid much attention to that, because my first pick was decided from the start. I was somewhat surprised the starters were chosen from the previous Pokemon  but... whatever, they are still awesome. After that, we can go out, after we get a Potion from Elm's assistant. Now we can get out the town and fight some Pokemon. As you can see, the mechanic is 100% turn based, same is in the original. After a while of logistic thinking (the game is MUCH harder this way, you can get lost quite easily. Also, we see a quite classic screen when my Charmander fainted. After getting teleported back to home, I start my journey anew, this time with much more success. (P.S: how the heck it got snowing so soon?). At the town itself you get a slight tour by an old timer, and have a chance to visit the Pokemon Center. This time, you don't risk pressing the "A" button one time too much :)

You probably saw more then is needed to get a first impression. As for me, it's an newly mined gem. And Nilllzz is making a great job trying to polish it to a high gloss. He posts frequent updates on his tumblr page.
Other than that, you can always watch my blog, I am going to inform you of all significant changes to the game. Mostly because I believe it can become a legend among Pokemon players. Someone finally took up the challenge to make an 3D game about training and battling with Pokemon. I am really surprised that it wasn't Nintendo's doing. But, seeing the results, and that this is still a VERY EARLY beta, we can't complain. We can even get happy with this :)

tl;dr : The game now is quite playable. More than enjoyable for any Pokemon fan. And it gets better in regular basis. If you like to play something new, than it's more than worth giving a shot :)

The Old and The New: Eye Of Beholder & Legend Of Grimrock

Some ideas for gaming grow old, and tend to be forgotten for a REALLY LONG time. Some genres became obsolete  when greater capabilities came to people who create video games. One such genre is the "dungeon crawler". Anyone heard about "The Bard's Tale" (the old one, from 1985) ? Cold... "Wizardy" ? Warm... "Might And Magic" ? Warmer...

Have you noticed I haven't named any newer games? It's because this genre was pretty much dead since the 1980s. There were a few released games of this type in the 90s, but not as much, as ten years before. So, the whole idea here, is to see how these games changed over the course of time. And I am going to compare two games from this genre: 

Eye Of Beholder and Legend of Grimrock

Also, don't forget to give the blog +1 on google + HERE

Why these two? The reasons are quite simple: I have both the games, I like, them, and they are 14 years apart. Enough to see how time has changed both the genre, and us, the gamers. I will sort this comparison in parts, each with a short video/set of screenshots to show you what I mean in the text.
But for starters, what is an dungeon crawler? To be short: it's a genre of game, where you/your party spend most of their time in a dungeon, trying to go lower/higher, fight monsters, beat puzzles, and defeat the "Evil One" (whenever it's an beholder/dragon/demon/evil archmage/etc. ). The focus of these games are exploration, puzzle solving and turn-like based combat.

Eye Of Beholder required from me to install DosBox on my PC. No chance running it natively on Windows XP/7/8

Here you can see the minimal requirements to play this games. They are here mostly to show you how LARGE is the time gap between these games. Years mean nothing when you talk about PC's, the hardware, however tells you everything.

Game Name	Eye Of Beholder	Legend of Grimrock
Processor	20 MHz	Dual Core 2GHz Intel or 2.8GHz AMD
Ram	< 1mb	2 GB
Graphics Card	Any VGA	ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or better
Sound card	Any	DirectX 9.0c compatible
Other	None	A mouse
Release Date	1990	April 11, 2012

Character creation and customization 

The character creation process in both games are similar,yet they differ from each other. To be more precise: Eye Of Beholder uses the AD&D 2ed. rule set  that is simplified during the character creation. You can't even select the spells your character know at the beginning of the game, which is... meh :/ Also, you can change your characters stats in ANY way you want. Yes, you can create a PC which has all stats maxed at the start of the game.

Legend of Grimrock uses his entirely new mechanics, and you have much more place for customization. Each character gets 10 points to give to statistics, up to 4 points to give to skills and can pick up to two traits. Oww, and I would forget. They are four races to pick, each of them change the available options to your PC. 

Gameplay

Let's face it: old games had to have something else then beautiful graphics to captive the players. In case of Eye Of Beholder it's the difficulty which attacks us from time to time. There is also an added handicap, that may not sound terrifying, but it is: NO MINI-MAP. Other than that, another difficulty builder are the environmental puzzles, that are the main cause of frustration in this game. You can sometimes spend half an hour clicking walls in search for an hidden switch. Below a short gameplay of the old timer. A little rushed one, but you can get the main idea :) 

In Legend Of Grimrock we can see... the same? o.O The gameplay is almost the same as in Eye Of Beholder. The most innovative thing is the way spellcasting is solved: you find a scroll with a magic spell. It says what kind of skills you need to cast the spell, and what runes you have to pick when casting the spell. You can see how it works at the end of the gameplay below, somewhere around the 11 minute mark. Also, THERE IS A MINIMAP. The game gets much simpler because of that, no more getting lost. There has been enough writing, you can see more at the video below :) 

About food

Suprised food has got a paragraph of it's own? It's vital in these games, LITERALLY. If your characters will go starved for a prolonged period of time, that will effect your characters capability to fight. And that is a REALLY bad thing. For you as a player. Just a small remainder of this fact :)  

The conclusion 

Old ideas do not die, they just go to sleep. And after someone wakes an idea up, he needs to take it to a plastic surgeon, and teach him how the world works now. In case of Legend Of Grimrock we have a good example of that: an idea from the previous century changed, so that it will be playable in the modern times. 

Similar Games:

In case you think you will like these kinds of games, you can also check out other titles where exploration, monster slaying, and thinking how to open the door standing before you are the main fun. Such games include (but it's not all of them):

• The Might and Magic series
• Wizardy 1-8
• The Bard's Tale (the ones from the 1980s)

Rest in peace THQ

We are witnesses of a sad day for gaming industry. One of the older companies just filled in for bankruptcy  Let's spend a moment of silence for THQ, and after that, let's recall their history....

The two most knows versions of the THQ logo, left one from 2000-2010, right from 2010-2012

Now, after we held our respects, let's remind ourselves about THQ. Let's start with all we probably know: they were both developers of great games, such as:

• Red Faction (first critacally acclaimed game with destructable terrain)
• Saints Row (I know people who call this game "the killer of GTA")
• Company of Heroes (one of the greatest RTS's history has known. 93/100 on metacritic agreess with mine opinion)
• Darksiders (a great game, however painful without playing on a pad) 

They also produced many good, but (in some cases) forgotten games, such as Summoner, Titan's Quest, Dawn Of War 1, Supreme Commander, Star Wars: Battle For Naboo. Even the youngest kids could have some fun thanks to them. They produced/developed games with Spongebob Squarepants, Scooby Doo, or the Teen Titans. They've got even My Little Pony in their portfolio.

I think those lastly mentioned productions were done because of THQ's history. Not everyone knows, that they had started as toy manufacturer in the early 1990s. They extended to video games in 1991 and from 1994 they decided to withdraw from producing toys, and focus on releasing games.

Their long history of making games has not saved them. Even moves, that someone might call desperate, such as the Humble THQ Bundle, and giving out Metro 2033 for FREE has not helped them.

Why I am writing this? Because I think the world of gaming will be much poorer without THQ and it's productions. I just hope that anyone who will buy their assets will continue making the games they had started, such as Metro: Last Light, Company of Heroes 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth or Saints Row 4.

THQ deserves our memory, for all the good moments they gave to us, gamers. 

Another moment of silence for them, and let's hope we won't have to write or read any more blog entries like this again....