Hurlshort

GI Joe is awesome, only commies think otherwise.

Ok, had a good weekend playing, got a human engineer up to level 10 and a few other characters up to 4 and 5. There are a fair amount of things done differently than other MMO's, so the learning curve was decent. Here are my pros and cons: + Loved the exploration, which is rewarded nicely. + Easy to get into area quests and events, very similar to Rift. + Crafting allows for some nice experimenting and has some logic to it. + Individual stories are a nice touch - Auction House (Trading Post) seems a bit crazy...you can basically buy everything you need for crafting? It was a bit hard to understand. - Not sure how I feel about the real money marketplace, seemed to be giving a significant edge to players. - Combat for melee characters was tough for me to follow, there was a lot going on and I couldn't really see what I was doing in the crowds. I'm sure time and practice would help that, but it made me more comfortable with ranged classes. I haven't even seen the PvP or WvWvW stuff, so I will try to check them out in a future beta.

Kings really need to win game 6. I know they've been good on the road, but going back to Jersey is bad news for them.

Ironclad - I thought this was a decent little medieval period action movie. The main character, a Templar, was Mark Antony on HBO's Rome, and he does a good job as the brooding warrior type. It's a bit of a mess historically, but most of that can be expalined by a small budget making it too hard to put hundreds of people in the battle.

I took the RV to the gas station to get it ready for our trip on Thursday. 23.5 gallons of gas for about $85. That will get me 250 miles. I had been waiting for gas prices to come down, which was predicted, and thankfully they did a few days ago. That coupled with a 30 cent discount from the Safeway gas station rewards, and I managed to get my price down as low as I could. Still pretty painful. I'll start a photo thread once we get on the road.

I really have no idea about esports. It doesn't appeal to me in the least. It would be nice if they can move towards that without alienating the casual player completely, I suppose. It is probably a decent revenue stream for CoH over time, so you can see why the developer would embrace it.

Alright, I admit I was wrong! The game looks much better live than it came across in the videos. Divinity's Reach is a very well done capital city. I've had no dip in framerate, it runs very well, but I joined a low pop server. So far the two classes I really like are engineer and ranger, I think one of them will end up being my main class when the game launches. There is a lot going on in this game too, it's taking me awhile to learn all the stuff. So what's the deal with the marketplace where you spend gems? They gave us a bunch for free, but is this going to be for microtransactions?

Started out a couple characters, the Norn *couldn't just call them Nord?) seem pretty cool, might be my race of choice. I am tired so I didn't get deep in the game, but it is fantastic looking for sure.

Agreed, I think about 10 minutes would be enough, like they could have handled the intro where they go down into the hole with the camcorder, and then moved back to a normal shooting style.

Played a new game of Mount and Blade: Fire and Sword. It didn't go well early one, I was captured twice and lost my horse. But now I've got a decent little band of fighters and I'm starting to get a bit more dangerous. I'm still pretty poor, but I'm woring my way up. This version plays very different than Warband and the original.

Seems we are about to witness the fall of another console; sad though, I've been with Nintendo since Iv'e started gaming. But with the economic situation and as it is 2013 may be the worst year of gaming in recent history. I really doubt that the WiiU will fail. Nintendo has had a terrible track record with third party developers for a long time, and yet they always find an audience for their consoles. They rely heavily on Nintendo developed software for the most part. They also target a completely different demographic compared to Sony and Microsoft. The Wii has a fairly weak stable of games considering its time in existence, yet it still sold like hotcakes.

Cool, free bonuses. Lone Survivor looks interesting.

I did 350. It seems like you would need to do a bunch of these to get a real clear indication of your speed. I also know I personally take awhile to get up to speed, when I'm grading tests the first few are always pretty slow, but once I hit a groove I get going pretty well.

Rift has also been out for over year and seems to have survived the release of TOR and carved a nice spot in the MMOscape. Pretty impressive what Trion Worlds was able to do with it.

I didn't buy it... Back to Volourn... Free 2 play Free 2 play Haven't quite heard of the last 2 in a while, so not sure how they fare. Are they still on a subscription model? What does that have to do with anything? They are still very successful MMO's. Turbine figured out that the f2p model actually increases their profits, as the hardcore players are willing to pay even more than a monthly subscription, and it allows casual gamers to pay small amounts as they play. They also still run off a subscription model, it is more of a hybrid than a total f2p game. EQ2 has implemented f2p aspects, Rift is still fairly new so they probably will wait awhile. Age of Conan has a fantastic starter island. The first 20 levels are simply fantastic. Unfortunately it drops off after that, it is a beautiful world to explore, but the game lacks cohesion. You can play the starter island for free though. I didn't put AoC on my list because despite an initial burst of success at launch, it was mismanaged and the developer had to make significant cuts. It is still going though, so obviously it wasn't a total loss for them.

I do love my MMO's. I did manage to not buy Tera, which came out recently. And with Guild Wars 2, at least there isn't a monthly fee! It's really been a good year or so for MMO's though. Rift was really good, Lord of the Rings expanded to Isengard, TOR came out...I've had trouble figuring out what to play.

Maybe. But Wow's success puts blindfolds on publishers, who just see big monies. Of course pretty much every MMO bursts like a bubble, but they can't see that... There are a ton of very successful and long running MMO's out there, so I'm not sure where you are getting that. TOR itself is still doing quite well, it would need a precipitous drop off to fail at this point. It is still in the realm of possibility, but it becomes less unlikely every month. Here's a short list of very successful MMO's currently running strong: Lord of the Rings Online City of Heroes Everquest 2 Rift That doesn't even include all the middling games that are still running and turning a profit. MMO's are a long term investment, they are risky, but they pay dividends much longer than a traditional game does.

I don't know how you guys do it, If I don't drink a few bottles of water every day I feel terrible. If I drink two sodas in a day I feel horrible too.

Volourn is correct. It's also much more than one single player game in terms of total content.

Back on the Xbox, Psychonauts used to make me nauseous (many 3D platformers do.) On the PC, so far it is much easier for me to handle, so I'm glad I got it. My daughter also played a bit, so that was fun.

I realy do not understand people playing MMOs who wants to have SP experience from the game... Because more often than not when you're running up to the end game content, you're generally going to be plowing through it alone. Whenever I played MMO and ended up playing it alone, it was a sign that the game sucks... Even in leveling up, I expect to have multiplayer experience... The more and more putting of SP experience into the MMOs, made me to stop playing them altogether, because I got bored in every single one I played in one or two weeks, and started to play SP only games again... You can still seek out groups in TOR, the heavier populated servers have plenty of people spread over the level spectrum leveling alts. TOR is different from other MMO's because of the very individual class stories, hence it manages to pull off a pretty satisfying single player experience.

Ah, my bad, I must have misunderstood him then.

Beautiful GD.

To be fair, the movie does look good and will probably make half a billion dollars when all is said and done.