Alien Swarm - First Impressions and Video

Alien Swarm Is a Free to play game available to everyone now on the Steam platform for PC, Its a top-down-4-player-coop-action-shooter and offers a campaign with a variety of missions for you and your friends to run through.

One of the more common aliens you will encounter, The Drone

Borrowing heavily from Sci-fi alien films such as well, Aliens it has a good tense atmosphere and can deliver some pretty pulse pumping moments whether its the unsettling noise of the Motion tracker (ripped straight from the colonel marines) or being surrounded by the aliens and mashing the rightclick button to riflesmash your way out of there .

It also includes character progression, levels gained through killing monsters and completing missions as well as unlocking new more effective firepower, items and powerups to help you succeed in your fight against the swarm and its plethora of nasties ranging from the common drone to things much nastier.


Take a look at the gameplay and watch me and Leest attempt the first level.



Overall I enjoyed the time we spent playing it and cant wait to pick it back up and complete the main storyline. Although the number of missions do bother me with asofyet only having the main campaign comprise of about 8 levels. Heres hoping the community modding and tinkering could heed more suprises for this little free gem of a game. So to conclude.....

....TRY IT OUT NOW WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?, GO SHOOT STUFF!

Til' next time.

The Problem With Diablo 3 - Part 1

The problem with Diablo 3, shall be a returning segment on just how far the Diablo 3 apple fell from the beloved Diablo tree.

I know you're thinking this...

 I shall return to these whenever I can muster the courage to talk about one of my favourite franchises of all time ( ALL TIME!! ) being bastardised and cut up to make Blizzard some more dough.

#1 - SKILL TREES AND STATS
 
Diablo 2, if any of you knew me, was one of my favourite games. The hours pumped into the online battle.net service was sickening and I played almost every other day for a good number of years. Constantly reinstalling to have one more crack and build up some new characters, make them my own,figure out how I would regain my riches and become a badass Summoning Necromancer or a Poision Necromancer OR BONE NECROMANCER. (yeah, I had a thing for the Necromancer class).

Ahhh the ole Posion Nova. *nostalgia*

It was a simple system, classic Blizzard you could say. When you level up you put points into a move and that move is more powerful, meaning that each person, could hone their character towards a certain playtype having some specialisation. Something to stand out from the crowd. Say you liked raising Skeletons from the dead, well pump it into your summoning skills and dont look back until level 80 by then you would have an army of little dudes running around and effectively doing your job for you.

This along with the easy to use Vitality, Engergy, Strength (required to wear items) and Dexterity (defence) stats page you could decide who you wanted to be, how you were going to do it and stuck by it. Actual progression with a sense of reward when you'd figure out "THAT BUILD".




Fastforward to Diablo 3, where they have dumped both of these systems completely. You no longer decide what powers you want to get, levelling them up as you go, choosing a favourite and developing your own way of playing your class.

Now you level up every other level, World of warcraft style and are handed preset skills, on preset levels. Unlocking a modifier that changes the skill, on preset skills, on preset levels.

"I WONDER WHAT ILL LEVEL UP NEXT, OH WAIT I ALREADY KNOW LOL"

Starting to sound a little boring? I hope so.

 Now I can only think this measure was taken to try and make each class soloable and not being completely wasted if your skill tree can't match up to those champion mobs in the Inferno difficulties and having the option to switch your build around as you please. But from what I have seen, It has made all but a few moves completely unviable. Some just dont match up to the power of those you unlock at a later date, and using them makes you look like a fucking tool. I tried setting up for a Homing Rocket Build on my Demonhunter and that lasted all of about 3 seconds, when I could just swtich back to the tried and tested quickfire that every Demonhunter in the game uses. Had I the choice in later levels to pump skill points of a sort into homing rockets It COULD be Viable, but in this present system experimentation yeilds little reward.

So let me make my feelings on this change clear. When you do this. EVERYONE IS THE SAME. Demonhunter 1 is Demonhunter 2, except he has painted his hat blue!

This makes rolling another character of the same class pointless so effectievly the maximum number of characters you will ever have in Diablo 3 will be 5. Great.

I found this such a backwards step. Say you want to play with friends, both you and your pal are set on the Wizard class. You will level up, exactly the same, each level, unlocking the same skills. Only your items will define you.

Subject A is Subject B, Subject B is Subject C and Subject C is Subject D.

So to conclude rather then bang on about this point for the rest of my life.

They have taken away the things that made Diablo 2 a world beater and a genre setter. Diablo has been watered down and turned into another arm of Blizzards money making scheme at the expense of gamers everywhere. They had the time and the tools to make this game better, In every regard. Improve upon ALL the systems which they have used to great effect in other Blizzard games. Just not this one.

This of course falls in line and becomes alot clearer when next we will talk about problem number 2, Loot....

Steam summer sale, DRM, and Games for Windows Live

As most PC gamers know the steam summer sale is now on providing most of us on the PC genre with a host of deals and goodies to take away. Me myself getting in on the action picking up the sequel to Bioshock (one of my all time favourite games).

This should be a tale of joy, me excitedly telling you of my joys of returning to that fabled place Rapture. But alas, all I have here for you is a tale of woe and Windows.

 Hope you enjoy it....

Today was gunna be a good day

So after installing this puppy as soon as possible I sat down to play it, eager beaver status was achieved and I fired up Bioshock 2. Only to bear witness to one of the gaming worlds biggest nightmares rearing its ugly head once more...

Oh, shit...

DRM in singleplayer games on steam is bad enough, not being able to play any of the games I've paid for when my Virgin internet decides to shut down is already a punishment in itself. But nothing can truly compare to the horror of Games for Windows.

This client is something personally I cant stand, the clunkiness and the time spent literally going around in circles to do the simplest things such as trying to invite friends to a game or look at your achievements made me want to ram my face into a wall until the stupid stopped. But having not tangled with it since my Dawn of War 2 early days (before THANKFULLY, the franchise moved onto being hosted by steam) I thought.

"Ok, you wanna dance? Lets do this".

Knowing I have an account, I made sure to log in to the Windows live website first to check it was working and attempted to access my account through the ingame login screen only to first be met with. "Unable to download account, windows live service may be down".

"Ok, well its not, you know what nevermind. Run as administator!"

*log in again, same message*.

"Look Games for windows, I've just bought this please dont makes this Age of Empires: Online, hmmm, alright I've added your client to my firewall, and steam thus giving you both full access to my machine"

*Click, "Windows Live is unable to download your profile, please check the network status of Games for Windows Live".*

"SONOVA..., OK ok ok, I read somewhere that you can launch game for windows games through thier client marketplace program, I'll just download that mofo, launch it, log-in from there and hey presto!"

Easy.... or so I thought.

After fighting with the installation of the client and trying to boot it, only to be met with errors the first few times, I had managed to sell my soul to the devil to somehow help me and after some light swearing and a few admin rule changes we were back on track!

Your mine now BIOSHOCK 2, MINE!!

 *tappity tap tap to login, and CLICK!*

..............

"FUCK YOU".

*Games for Windows Live: "TROLOLOLOL"*

I would like to communicate on communing.

THE QUESTION

 

While everyone is praising communication in our digitally consumed world, I shall attack this from a different angle. (As I am one to play devils advocate in any conversation) This particular counter point being “Is digital communication having a detrimental effect on the physical?”

So to pass a college course I sit tapping buttons of no real world importance and creating a purely digital blog, people can read entire libraries of books and works completely on a tablet, moreover an estimated 80% of the worlds money being just a figure bouncing around different databases.

The Internet has us better connected in this virtual world, exchanging data and helping us elevate the pressure of having to ask our peers for the information we need. Instead we go straight to the answers without considering the solutions. But have we been left lacking in the real world?

I have now posed a question that may be harder to answer compared to my short time thinking up said question.

Being a man of manners but also a frequent London Underground commuter I shall use my experience of facing the daily trip into the heart of that fair town to somehow justify my grandiose statement.

 I see evidence of this social decline all over.  I challenge you the reader, the next time your waiting at a station count the number of bent heads and jabbing fingers, all sucked into some world of a disgruntled bird or commenting on a picture they aren’t even in (“OMgz Babe u lk gr8!!!xox!one”).

Is this the future of communication? We proudly traipse around, digitally shouting in to what may as well be a jam-jar with some witty status or thought that we have come up which we feel we must share just to prove that we too are socially networking with our peers. But that’s it, you have closed yourself off, you have approved these select 100 people to be your universe, all else who doth so stand in your way shall be shunned by your mobile distraction device as you delve into it’s sphere of safety.

But to hammer home my point I shall take on board our first lesson on this digital media course of using my personal experience instead of the commonly used overview, even if it is shared commonly by the select few who feel that the past 5 years of communication has taken a step backwards in truly connecting us together.

No Place shows the breakdown of communication better!

 THE EXPERIENCE

 As I sat writing the post below, scribbling away on a notepad taking inspiration from this one particular woman who barged her way onto the train knocking papers and people possessions flying. Waiting there still looking at her phone for a man who in her opinion was taking up the space where she could sit. No “excuse me”, no “may I sit here?” just indicating by her sigh and giant slump onto his bag and blazer announcing that she was here.  And there she was for at least a full 20 minutes never once looking up, unless to shoot a look of disapproval of anyone speaking too loudly that wasn’t on her friends list, meanwhile I sat there thinking up more points to make on this musing of mine. But to my horror the secret of her constant tapping was revealed to me. Her boyfriend (or possibly) husband walked onto the train and I took this moment to reflect that maybe I was wrong, maybe she just wanted her husband with her so she could disconnect from that virtual world she was locked into and have some serious real world conversation. They embraced; and I was humbled (for once).

As I sat smiling my eyes witnessed the final nail in the coffin for what I would present to you here today. Their quick kiss ruined by her slumping back into the now empty seats and immediately going back to her social networking or bird throwing or whatever seemed to be more important than this real world relationship she was having with this man. “How dare she” I thought, this poor soul. Following this mindless husk living out her fragile years completely sucked into digitally. WAIT. He’s. You’re KIDDING! He gets out his I-phone 4 sits in silence no eye contact. No, merging files and messaging clients (I can only presume) Is more important. No words were exchanged between them apart from the odd remark of whom they were speaking to.

The future of technology no doubt is here and we are connected in ways people had only dreamed of before but have we somewhere along this timeline stopped advancing and take the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque to withdraw us from the wonder of the things going on around us to make sure our online profile picture is perfectly cropped...

TL:DR Technology has it's setbacks.