SPAAAAACE!!!

I wish I had time to make an actual blog post today, but I'm leaving early to get to a New Year's Eve party. Instead, I'll offer you this Wallpaper that I found on the Steam Forum for Portal 2. :D

My apologies again guys, and have a Happy New Year!


SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Free To Play, Every Day: DC Universe Online

Free-to-play games are gaining ground in recent years. The subscription fee is quickly becoming extinct it seems, and somehow, the "pay if you want special things" model is working better. Offering quality service and products to customers is sometimes enough to entice them to throw money at you I suppose, but I guess if the products in question are vanity items and XP boosts and whatnot, then that's good enough by itself. I tried the recently-converted DC Universe Online for a few reasons. For one, a superhero multiplayer online game isn't entirely new, and I had played a couple of them before (I might talk about them another time), so I was curious to see how this one held up. Second, playing as a superhero is really fun and awesome. Third, I love DC and all of their superheroes and villains, so an MMO about them all is just a comic nerd's dream come true. Granted I'm not much of a comic nerd, but I am a nerd nonetheless.

With that said, I'll call this kind of post "Free To Play, Every Day", where I attempt to play and give a casual overview of a free game. They'll probably be mostly MMO games, but I'm sure there are games out there that are also free besides them. Anyway, on to DCUO.

Opening Cinematic

The action seems to have started without us. Metropolis is in ruins, and several heroes are fighting to the death in front of our eyes. It's pretty awesome for what it is, and it explains the story very well. In the future, Lex Luthor and other DC villains have defeated Superman and pretty much the rest of the Justice League, but during the battle of heroes and villains (Did I mention this was awesome?), Brainiac invades and begins to delete the planet. Lex Luthor travels back in time to inform the still-alive heroes of the coming threat, releasing a bunch of robotic parasites into the atmosphere of earth, each containing powers of heroes from the future, to infect a ton of people to fight against Brainiac. Of course, you can choose yourself if you want to be a hero or a villain. It's a simple, yet entertaining story that makes sense and is bound to contain lots of conflict and action.

Character Creation

I enjoyed the character creation for the most part. Anything you choose is then animated by your avatar, which not only is helpful, but some of the visuals really stand out and make the powers and weapons look awesome in their own way. There are definitely a lot of options to choose from and a lot of possible combinations. Of course you choose your gender, your faction, your name, and your general character build, which ranges from short and childish to tall and muscular. Some other things you choose will affect your character in various ways:

• Template: Customize your hero from the ground up, or pick a pre-made template that models an existing DC hero or villain. All you'd have to do with a template is design the costume.
• Personality: From serious to comical, this determines the emotes and idle behavior of your character. This is purely aesthetic.
• Travel: Preferred choice of moving around quickly: Flight, Acrobatics, or Speed.
• Mentor: Depending on hero or villain, you pick a "mentor" falling under Tech, Bio, or Magic. The mentor you pick out of the 3 types determines your starting location after the tutorial and the general questing line your mentor sends you on.
• Power: Determines what role you can play in a group and your abilities in combat. Each power as a tree for damage and a tree for a specialized role (tank, healer, controller)
• Weapon: What you choose here will determine if your regular attacks are ranged or melee. Each weapon has both kinds of attacks, but some have more of one kind than others. I did mention this game has no auto-attack, right? Hack-n-slash is the game we're playing.

Lastly, you design your own costume, piece by piece. My only complaint here is the similarity in a lot of the parts. There are some parts that stand out, and a lot of them look amazing, but another lot of costume pieces are named relatively the same thing. You can pull a lot of combinations off, but a lot of others will look like you're wearing a superhero "clown suit". A lot of the hairstyles are rehashes of each other too, but with different facial hair or facial markings. This is fine I suppose, but I would have preferred separate options for my face rather than one long list of names. Overall though, the creation process is a little on the simple side, but deep enough to make yourself look different from everyone else, which is what really matters in the end.

 

User Interface

 

Fairly straightforward stuff here. Press numbers to shoot/slice/punch/whatever your abilities do, and Escape brings up your options menu, which also includes your trees and abilities. Health and magic bars are up in the top-left corner, and your target's bars are next to it. Chatbox in the lower left, and quest objectives in the lower right. You can't beat what's well known and works well. Not much else to see here.

 

 Gameplay

As far as the actual important part of a video game goes, it plays pretty solidly. For having no auto-attack, normally a staple in any MMORPG, it works out very well as a hack-n-slash game. The lock-on system can get a little weird when your character flies through a group of enemies to attack another on the other side of the room, but it generally works when you want to kill something specific quickly. The earlier levels are a little newbie-friendly with your magic and health regenerating fairly quickly, which is fine. A good amount of the quests allow you to turn them in on the go, which is a welcome feature. In some cases, they even cross with the opposing factions' quests, which can turn into some good low level PvP.

With the keyboard, the controls are alright. It's easy to turn on your travel power with the space bar, but it took me a good five minutes to find out that pressing F turns it off by default. Some of the other buttons are a little confusing too, while others are simple to find. I also tried playing with an Xbox 360 Controller, and it works surprisingly well. Flying around was easier than with the keyboard, and using abilities was simple and effective. The multiple menus were harder to access though, since all I had to do with the mouse and keyboard was press one key and then click the rest of the way, while with the controller the Left Stick was left in the dust. Both control schemes work fairly well, depending on your personal preference, and you can map them however you want.

Summary

I think the game deserves all the praise that it's receiving. To have gone from a tight subscription model to the "freemium" model since its release about a year ago and still be this profitable is rather impressive. Personally though, I'm not sure if I'll be spending money on it. For me the blame can be placed in multiple places. I'm not an all-out DC fan, but more than enough to want to play a superhero game online. Also, once the maximum level 30 is reached, there are 8-person instances and other quests to do that are level 30-exclusive, which several report can take about 15-16 hours in one sitting to get to. While there is plenty of content to find, including paid DLC if you are a Free or Premium player, I'm not sold on the Legendary subscription fee of $15 per month. You get all DLC and content for "free" plus maximum character slots and accessories, which is nice. However, I'm more along the lines of seeing the content rather than making my character look really cool. Besides, I could just purchase the DLC separately for $10 each.

It has pretty great controls that work well, and the gameplay is integrated even better with the hack-n-slash, no-auto-attack style. The interface is simple enough to understand, and the voice acting is pretty good. If you're a die-hard, all-or-nothing DC fan, then maybe the Legendary subscription is for you. Otherwise, my personal recommendation is to play for Free, spending whatever you want on what minor or major features you want as you go. Chances are that once you buy a few things you'll be eligible for Premium, which just gives you a few more worthwhile character slots and inventory space. It seems cheaper to me than the subscription as long as you don't go overboard with your wallet on your first outing.

Oh, and this game has the god damn Batman in it. That's more than enough reason to play. :)

Steam-y Goodness

Let's face it: Being a gamer is not a cheap hobby. First of all, you have to purchase the hardware that your games run on. Your selections usually run from Nintendo's broadly-advertised-but-low-tech Wii to Sony's niche-audience-but-high-tech Playstation 3 (or at least that's been the general trend for the past 6 years or so). I know it's the Holiday season, but discounts aside, when you suddenly decide that you're interested in playing video games, you'd better have your checkbook or credit card ready in your gun holster to burn away up to $300, and you'd be grateful that you weren't buying it when they first came out. Playstation 3 for $600? Damn!

Anyway, after buying your expensive magical plastic box, barring the fact that you bought a bundle pack, you'll now have to go spend more money on the discs that you want to stick into it. Everybody should know the situation here. The cheap games are usually the movie-endorsed ones or the more child-friendly ones, and the big titles from the popular developers are on the expensive side. The former can range around 10-$20, while the finely crafted software will cost you closer to 50-$60. I'm mostly speaking from recommended retail prices, but this sums up the general jist of this expensive hobby today.

Even the handheld scene is on the pricey side, with hardware reaching higher than $100 and games at $30 or more. Even back a couple of decades ago with the Nintendo Entertainment System, games were 40-$50!

Fortunately, it's almost 2012. Why is that a good thing? Because we have something called the internet here in the 21st century, and it, along with infamous software developer Valve, have created an online store for the distribution of games on the PC and Mac, and it is simply known as Steam.

 

Now, if you've been living under a rock for the past 10 years or so, then first of all, get off your lazy ass and spend some more time on the internet and more time using that aforementioned plastic box you paid big bucks for. Secondly, you need to discover this amazing web service. Valve Software, developers of well-known franchises such as Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, and Portal, somehow find enough time and people to maintain this wonderful service on top of making amazing video games.

If you're familiar with online shopping (see the previous "living under a rock" comment"), then you'll feel right at home. It's as simple as adding a product to your virtual shopping cart and checking out. After you purchase your game(s), you can choose to keep the software for yourself or to gift it to another user on the Steam Network. The only difference between say, Amazon.com and this is (aside from the obvious) is that once you purchase software, you download the game(s) directly to your computer. Awesome? Damn right.

What does this have to do with games being expensive? Easy! Valve holds annual sales in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, as well as daily deals, mid-week deals, and weekend deals on random games. The deals are usually better than you could find anywhere else, ranging from 50-75% off!

 

Now, the service isn't all entirely perfect. During the huge sales (like the one going on right now), there tends to be a lot of traffic around the site, especially when the loads of new daily deals are announced each day at 10am Pacific Time. Some features on the site may run very slowly or may just flat out not work, even for hours on end. You probably want to be familiar with gaming on the PC or Mac too, as it's your only option here. There's also the issue of not being able to return games with a copy of the receipt you receive, just like retail locations can do, but these are mere nitpicks compared to everything else that Valve has done with this online store.

If you haven't heard of or signed up for Steam yet, you need to fix that. It's one of the greatest things ever to happen to a gamer considering the stubborn prices that we have had to deal with for decades now. To have a service like this available to gamers worldwide is surely an accomplishment worthy of our praise, and if we must throw our money in someone's face in order to entertain ourselves, then it might as well be the guys that, according to Valve founder Gabe Newell, created a "greater service value than pirates".

With that said, have a happy holiday and a great new year. :)

Gotta Fetch 'em All!

Turning 16 years old next February, Pokémon has become a near-perfect definition of the word "timeless". I love Pokémon, having owned every handheld version of the game except for Blue and Black, and even a handful of the countless spin-off games to boot. Many see the franchise from the outside as for children, which is probably true at least for the animé series in the States (personally it ran dry for me halfway through the Johto saga) and maybe a few of the video games, but multiple surveys have pegged the average age of a Pokémon player at around 20 years old. Unless the term "teenager" decided to go away and college students were considered full-blown children, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, but I digress.

The story of the average Pokémon game is as classic as the Game Boy handheld it started on. Young trainer receives his first Pokémon, travels around the region capturing and training other Pokémon and battling gym leaders, earning their badges, then proceeding to defeat the Pokémon League's Elite Four and Champion. Simple, yet effective, and no matter what region you're exploring, it's always fun to see what surprises lie around every corner in every new region in every new game. New Pokémon, new gym leaders, and new continents have always kept us coming back for more.

How long can this keep going on?

Don't get me wrong, it is certainly fun to see what kinds of new creatures Gamefreak comes up with every time and seeing what lies in store in each new continent, but the general formula for the typical Pokémon game is getting a little stale for me. When I played my first game, Red version, it was fun talking to the NPCs, running into wild Pokémon (besides Zubat), battling random trainers, getting interrupted by your Rival, and trying to catch all 150 Pokémon. Today, there are 5 pairs of corresponding games, which not only comes to a total of 649 Pokémon, but when playing through my new White version this past year, it was very predictable what and when everything would happen. I could see the conclusion of the game before I started playing, I could generally predict when and where my Rival was going to show up and battle me, and it had its own token rodent/bird/bug variation that would always be found in the first patch of grass, just like the last 3 generations of games.

Other features like awesome handheld tools (step counter, in-game clocks and timers, Vs. Seeker), the pop-out graphics, the animations added to the Pokémon sprites, and the now near-perfect Wi-Fi functions added into the game have made them very worthwhile and at the very least replayable to an extent. Still, I could probably tell you what is going to generally happen in the next predicted Pokémon "Grey version" or whatever the next interim version will be called. It'll have the same exact storyline as Black and White with one major difference in the plot involving a different legendary (probably Kyurem), making changes as necessary to emphasize it. Having the same predictable story being retold to us each time is kind of annoying, and it can possibly pose a problem if Gamefreak runs out of Pocket Monsters to generate or new features to create.

This is why I have very fond memories of the two 3D games on the Gamecube: Pokémon: Collosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. They had nearly nothing in common with the handheld games other than the prospect of capturing Pokémon, but even that was different than the handheld games. You could weaken and capture opponent's Pokémon, but only ones that had been affected by an evil type of shadowy contamination, which would be cleansed through a purification ritual. Nothing like that had ever been done before in any handheld version, and it still hasn't been done to this day.

I'm merely spitballing here, but in my opinion, it wouldn't kill the developers to try thinking outside the box. The main handheld series shouldn't go away at all, but wouldn't you enjoy a Pokémon game where you played something other than a young trainer on their journey, like say, playing as the bad guys or as a gym leader? It doesn't even have to be like that even. A whole new world could be made where Pokémon are used as essential slaves, and you're a somewhat lone believer in them being mutually beneficial creatures that can coexist with humans. I'm just chucking ideas here guys. I mean, for the love of Arceus, this is Pokémon! It practically sells itself! Trying new ideas on the franchise shouldn't be that hard to do! (Making endless amounts of spinoff games doesn't count either. I'm talking the main RPG series here.)

With that said, I eagerly await something new from the people over at The Pokémon Company. I'm anxious to see some kind of new innovation in their handheld versions, and I'm eager to see a new 3D console game that isn't a glorified item shop (Battle Revolution for Wii wasn't all that impressive. Don't get me started.)

Also, let's see a World of Warcraft-esque MMO. It's almost 2012 and this doesn't exist yet. I'd say most of your fanbase and myself included agree that this is a problem. :)

A Monologue about a Hedgehog (part 3)

Still following? Good, because frankly I didn't think I would have to stretch this monologue this long, but then again, monologues aren't entirely known for being short right? I guess I'm very passionate about this blue mammal (probably more than I realize), and seeing him go from ridiculously awesome to complete and utter shit and back again just makes for a really good history lesson and a fun story to tell.

Anyway, Sonic Colors. It came out just last year, and before its release, people were expecting yet another typical phone-in Sonic game, complete with buggy platforming and camera controls. It wasn't that hard to get on this bandwagon, as Sonic had pretty much devolved into nothing but a public joke.

The environments were a step up, but I guess they might have to be if your setting is going to be an interstellar amusement park built to capture and exploit tiny wisp creatures. Speaking of which, there were tiny wisp creatures. They acted like Mario power-ups in a way that gave Sonic powers like digging through the ground or rocketing into the air or sticking to surfaces with spikes. They were definitely more interesting than holding a sword or turning into a werehog, but they were more like "level themes" instead of proper power-ups, only having one kind around at a time, a lot of the time.

Of course the story was still pointless and dumb, but that didn't really matter. Was the speed and platforming fun enough to keep people interested? Well, sort of. Colors received mixed reviews, being praised for better controls and better use of environments than Sonic's last outings, but criticized for being sort of boring. Hope was on the rise though, and it was only going to be better.

Fast forward a year to this past November and the release of Sonic Generations. This was the first Sonic game that I have personally bought in the past six years, and I'm glad I did. Sonic had turned 20 years old, and to celebrate, a game was made that featured 9 different past levels of Sonic games, each with a 2D and a 3D version featuring an appropriately chronologically accurate Sonic. There were also a couple things from Colors there too, like the red ring collecting and the ever-present boost meter, and there was even unlockable concept art and even more music from past games. They couldn't have put together a better nostalgia bomb if they had tried.

Or could they?

Yeah, Sonic Generations is awesome, and it deserves all the praise it gets, especially my own for drawing me back into Sonic games and believing that the hedgehog is back from the grave. However, there are just a few nitpicks that were commonly voiced among fans. Even though Sonic's popularity is kept up to this day mostly because of the Genesis era games, only 3 worlds were featured from them, with the others being from the more noticeable 3D games. There were far many more 2D levels that are fondly remembered than 3D ones, and they could have made many, many more than just 9 worlds solely based on that, let alone picking 3D levels for two-thirds of the game, and including a Sonic Colors level, which only came out last year. Still, it was interesting to see how a 2D level would look in 3D and vice versa, and the gameplay was impressive if not perfect at recapturing what made Sonic awesome to play in the first place. His friends were still there and annoying as ever, the plot was still dumb (though cool if you enjoy a twist ending), and the game was kind of short, but overall, I enjoyed the game a lot not only because of the nostalgia, but because Sonic was finally fun to play once again.

That's about all I have to say honestly. Sonic the Hedgehog, one time famed gaming mascot, devolved into ridicule and back, is becoming better. Who knows? We might even see some kind of renewal of mascot wars of years past. Could you imagine if today Sonic and Mario games were made to combat each other again just like in the early 90s? Wow...

I'll leave you with this, as I'm sure you're sick of me talking about Sonic now. If you do end up playing Generations, good on you, and you'll be listening to this little piece of nostalgia during the credits.

A Monologue About a Hedgehog (part 2)

 (I'm largely paraphrasing again, just to remind you all)
 
After Sonic Heroes, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had mixed feelings on where Sonic was running. We got our answer in late 2005 when another game was released, only this time featuring Shadow, the anti-hero introduced in Adventure 2. There was a spoken popularity trend for the black hedgehog, so I guess this was sort of predictable, and there were some unanswered questions left at the end of Adventure 2. That's not really what matters though. Did the game hold up to the now-present standards of the previous Sonic games, complete with interesting platforming and speedy levels?

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Hell no.

Longest answer: Why? Why would you do this kind of shit to us, your loyal fans? What were you thinking? How does this make any sense? Is this some kind of a joke? Did you think we would like this? Hell no!

This is where I lost sight of Sonic the Hedgehog. It's one thing to make a game about another character in the Sonic universe (which doesn't have to be bad, but more on that later), but to take such a drastic turn and pull off some of the stuff they did is just horrifying for long-time fans. How on earth did they get motorcycles, cussing, and especially guns through the editing department without one single soul saying, "Uh, guys? Why does our semi-popular offshoot character suddenly use guns, ride motorcycles, and throw swearing around like its cool?". Up until this point, people had always viewed Sonic as not only a character for all ages, but a type of game franchise that smaller kids could get into easily and have some fun. I can only imagine what types of reactions were had when this piece of crap was announced.

As a tangent here, my opinion on Sonic and his literal truckload of friends is that they are fine existing as NPCs, but not as wholly playable characters. The focus should be on Sonic and maybe 1-2 sidekicks like Tails and Knuckles, and that's it. I'm sure that there could be some leeway there about who could be playable, and I'm sure that a perfectly fine game could be made about another one of his friends, but if you're going to pick the good guy that is the literal anti-Sonic, then you don't have to go so far as to make an anti-game with things that you would never find in a Sonic game. To be completely honest, even though Shadow is pretty popular and I do kind of like him myself, he isn't all that great of a doppleganger, anti-hero sort of guy. All I've seen him do is taunt Sonic and lose to him before becoming a good guy, and then...nothing.

Anyway, things only got worse from then on. I personally did not play any Sonic game for the next 6 years from having been disgusted and let down by Shadow the Hedgehog, so I can't really say a whole lot about the next few games other than the general tone that I heard coming from fans. This post is already getting long too, so I'm going to skim a little bit. I don't think any of you will mind. Trust me.

A few more handheld titles appeared in the next year or so on the Nintendo DS and PSP. The PSP games were battle games that were largely forgettable, but the DS games were pretty good and kept true to the handheld tradition of Sonic games that had been around since Sega had their own handheld system, the Game Gear.

Sonic the Hedgehog, released on the Xbox in 2006, is largely regarded as where Sonic hit rock bottom. Rushed to the release date like there was no tomorrow, it was ridden with bugs and terrible platforming that made the game simply not fun to play. The story had nearly nothing to do with previous Sonic games and for those brave enough to last through to the ending, they were rewarded with probably the stupidest thing to happen since Sonic was given a race car to drive back in 1994.

Ugh...moving right along...a couple of games where Sonic was flung into random storybook tales were released, including Sonic and the Secret Rings (Arabian Nights) and Sonic and the Black Knight (King Arthur). They didn't feature anything worth noting other than some of his random friends being turned into characters in the stories and none of the humanoid characters ever questioning what the talking anthropomorphic hedgehog was or why their comrades were suddenly turned into anthropomorphic talking animals.

Somewhere along the way, a new racing series where Sonic, yet even more new rivals turned friends, and the rest of the crew took to hoverboards and raced around futuristic cities. They happened. Three times now.

In 2008, Sonic Unleashed had our at-one-time-popular hedgehog become a werewolf, or if you insist, a werehog, whenever day turned to night. Daytime levels (normal Sonic) were of average quality, while night levels had Kratos from God of War shaking his head and stabbing himself in the eyes as to how pointless and slow Sonic had become with the inclusion of a stretchy-armed joke of a werewolf.

After so many diversions and flat-out thoughtless things being thrown out as Sonic games, many believed the blue blur to have kicked the bucket. Popularity was the only thing he had to keep him alive from shitty game to shitty game. After such a long time of random bullcrap, you'd probably think that Sonic Team was even tired of it just by judging what they were pulling out of their asses. Anyone you walked up to just thought that Sonic should just live in the past.

Then something else happened.

Sonic the Hedgehog, long thought dead, had a spark of hope emerge from his gimmick-ridden corpse. A spark that today, is reviving him and rocketing him into what he once was 20 years ago.

(to be concluded in part 3)

A Monologue about A Hedgehog (part 1)

This past November, Sonic the Hedgehog turned 20 years old. If there's anything to make you feel old, it's a statement like that. Not a lot of game characters have withstood the test of time like he has, and to come back from what might be the worst franchise drought in history, is incredible just by itself let alone still being around afterward. I'm speaking of course about Sonic Generations, which ironically features not only the modern day Sonic, but the classic Sonic that most people are fond of. Funny how Generations is being called "the game that saved Sonic", huh?

Other than that, to speak kindly of Sonic would be to mainly refer to his games on the Sega Genesis, which I personally played the hell out of all of them, but mostly Sonic 3 and Knuckles, and especially both at the same time when you could combine the two cartridges into one mega game that intersected after you beat one half. Imagine if that could be done today. Mega Mario Galaxy anybody?

There were other nostalgic games for the Genesis like Sonic CD and a few spinoffs like Sonic Spinball, a pinball game that used Sonic as the pinball, but they certainly didn't sell as well as the main adventure games.

(In case you haven't noticed by now, I'm LARGELY paraphrasing the history of this personally beloved hedgehog here, so just roll with me if you could).

After gaming left the early 90's and leaped into the third dimension (the REAL third dimension, not the Sega Saturn one), Sonic had to find a way to mix his speed-style gameplay with 3D platforming. It worked a little bit at first with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 on the late Sega Dreamcast. Some found it interesting to finally see their blue blur come to life, complete with full voice acting and explorable environments, while others didn't know what to make of it. By the time handheld games arrived at large in the late 90's and early 00's, Sonic swept the scene with some good two-dimensional titles that reminded us of years past, showing that the hedgehog still was alive and kicking.

But then, something happened.

Firstly, Sega made Gamecube ports of both Adventure games, both of which I didn't really mind, but then a little game came out called Sonic Heroes at the beginning of 2004. I played it, and it felt very different. Not just different gameplay-wise, but different in a way where you get a feeling of uneasiness and unfamiliarity, like you're afraid of the dark even though you know nothing is out there. The game wasn't perfect, but it at least had a creative new take on its levels where you had a team of 3 Sonic characters performing different functions on levels, aside how much sense it didn't make for a Sonic game. Pictured below is probably why I had the feeling I had.

Now, what happens next is pretty obvious, and I'm going to save it for another post. I need to find the exact wording I'm going to use for the inevitable tidal wave of shit that I'm going to talk about, as it is the elephant in the room whenever you talk about Sonic that always needs to be addressed (no matter how much you don't want to). In the meantime, go copy the above picture of "Team Rose", print it out, then tape it to your favorite dartboard and proceed with a rousing game of darts.

Bonus points if you hit Big the Cat below his fat belt buckle.

From Demons to Pandas

World of Warcraft. The name alone is enough to send half the internet into an uproar of praising and rioting, while the other half sits there and stares in either awe or disgust.

I have to give credit where it's due: Blizzard knows their stuff when it comes to making video games. Not only have they made and maintain probably the most successful MMO in history, but they have spawned other franchises alongside it like Starcraft and Diablo that hold their own incredibly large fanbases by themselves. When put together, that's a lot of freakin' people.

Yet, as of this moment, I can say with absolute near-confidence that I am bored.

Yeah yeah, Diablo 3 isn't out yet and Starcraft 2 is having an expansion soon, but WoW is a different breed of Blizzard game. It's based on one of their first successful games that they ever released, and if we count the years from then, the story has been going for 17 years now. Starcraft and Diablo have been around for a long time too, but Warcraft has had 3 RTS games and an MMO, with 1-2 expansions for the last two RTS's and the MMO about to have its fourth. To have a game franchise last that long with so many iterations and still make the amount of money it rakes in every year is nothing short of a miracle, and yet...why do I feel so underwhelmed?

I started playing in the second expansion, Burning Crusade, right around when Patch 2.3 came out. I was incredibly naive at the time, basically raiding Karazhan and Gruul's Lair all the time. It was a blast, especially when the next expansion came out. I had never experienced something like it before: starting fresh with everyone else, leveling up 10 more levels, going through each new raid tier in a guild, and everything else. It was an absolute blast.

But then...something happened. Things started getting more and more dull. Raiding started to feel like a chore. Other console and PC games that weren't MMOs were taking up more of my time. WoW started to seem like a hanging investment rather than a fun game filled with RPG goodness. I couldn't figure out why the game was becoming so boring and lifeless, yet I still kept raiding and playing into the Cataclysm expansion. Here I am, at the end of said expansion, at a crossroads.

I'm sure I'm not the first to arrive at this decision. One possible road has you still playing, either finding new and good ways to make the game fun again and enjoying the friends you've made over the years online, or outright failing and having a pretty good feeling of disappointment when you find that the risk you took was for nothing. On the other hand, you can outright quit and not take any risks at all, but you would be letting down the obligation you feel for your friends in the guild you've been in for so long, and letting such a long investment go so easily just doesn't sit right in your mind.

Luckily, Blizzard recently announced a feature called the Annual Pass, where if I agree to pay for WoW for the next year, I not only get a standard edition of Diablo 3 for free online (U jelly?), but I get a free invite to the next expansion's beta test.

Stop. The God. Damn. Presses.

This is exactly what I or anyone for that matter needs for making a concrete decision on staying. I can test the next expansion, and if I'm not impressed, I can leave. I have already agreed to pay for the next year, so even if I get a little nostalgic or some shit like that, I can login and do whatever until my subscription runs out. It's genius!

I got plenty more to say, but this post is already long enough. Maybe more a little later, which could be anywhere from tomorrow to whenever the hell I feel like it.

Give Me Liberty or Kingdom Hearts III

I freakin' love the Kingdom Hearts games.

While I should say that Square Enix isn't at their best right now (*cough* Final Fantasy XIV *cough*), one thing they did do right is take a seemingly huge risk at making a game that combined their own Final Fantasy characters and...Disney cartoons? Yep, and somehow, it really works out to be a wonderful adventure game with tons of memorable moments and a huge backstory.

Still, one has to wonder if the backstory is too huge. Aside from the first outing on the Playstation 2 and the later sequel, the continually expanding universe of Kingdom Hearts is nothing short of an extensive wikipedia article by now, and it will continue to grow from the release of several spin-off games on consoles that aren't the Playstation 3. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I played 358/2 Days and loved it on Nintendo DS, and it really explained the unexplained when it came to Roxas and Organization XIII. However, that happened before Kingdom Hearts 2, and while I am interested in knowing the whole story, the cliffhanger at the end of 2 is definitely more interesting to me.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be spin-off games (if you can even call them that), but in terms of the timeline of released titles, they sure are taking their sweet time making Kingdom Hearts 3. Yeah I know, the crew probably have more important projects to work on at the present moment, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a ton of fans out there like me who are anxious as hell to see what that note from King Mickey said instead of what happened in the past or between games. The very first game came out in 2002, and while Chain of Memories connected the first and second games and held its own pretty well for a digression in 2004, Kingdom Hearts 2 came out in 2006. Since then, there has been a PSP title, a Nintendo DS title, a 3DS title coming out next year, and...a mobile phone title? Okay...

It's almost 2012, and I'm kind of praying I can get to see Kingdom Hearts 3 before the world ends in a fiery ball of rumor-ridden death. Who knows though? Maybe Square Enix is secretly working with Valve in an undisclosed location, both developers crafting the hell out of their greatest games that the world has ever seen.

Yet, I can think of another game that we know a lot about, has a 3 in the name, is from a pretty famous developer, and that I really want to play. It'll cause a fiery hell to be unleashed when it finally launches, even though it's being caused by a Blizzard...

Yeah, that joke was terrible. 8D