Needle in a Haystack

With the advent of online gaming going from little known tech geek nirvana to full fledged industry juggernaut over the past 20 or so years, it’s created it’s own digital wild west. Just about all online games are anything goes type affairs, including blatant racism, sexism, homophobia or any other act that anonymous users can muster up in some lame attempt at being an internet tough guy.

It’s not really limited to specific genres either, hell, even playing Hot Shots Golf you will find people that are just assholes for the sake of being assholes. And beyond player to player interaction, you also get the fun of people who will do anything to cheat the system, work out systems with friends to climb the ranks, or people who just have total disregard for the rules of the game and their purpose is to basically just break the game play.

The place this happens the most, I think because of it’s very nature, is in sports games. Take any random football for instance… the vast majority of the people you play have no regard for how the game of football is played. They will abuse glitches, they will run offenses that work in the game but would never work in real life (Like dropping back 30 yards with your QB buying you enough time for the AI to completely break down and finding yourself open receivers).

This type of play seems to be common place in Madden 08, and in fact it seems like EA supports it as all their Madden Tourneys are just cheese fests. A bunch of hardcore gamers who are looking to beat each other in a video game, not a game of football.

I don’t really have a problem with this. I mean, personally, I like to play a fair, sim based game of football. But with this being the wild west you take the good with the bad. The bad being that if you play random idiots you will play something barely resembling the game. The good being that there are other folks out there that share the same passion for a solid game of sim football.

One such place is Xbox Live Sports Leagues. These guys have gone above and beyond to create a community where playing the game as it was designed to be played is the order of the day, and they are even adding to the games by giving users in their community the chance to add further to the game by hosting leagues and tools that the games themselves have given us yet.

So while it sucks that most every game you get into is going to be filled with jerks, there are some great underground communities that help you filter all of that out. I plan on featuring more of these in the future. But check out XLSL and get yourself ready for Madden 09.

Age of Conan – First Impressions

I am a huge fan of MMOs. You can buy me 100 Xbox 360 games and I won’t get the playtime out of them that I will from one good MMO. World of Warcraft had me by the balls, literally and figuratively. I’ve dumped more time into that game than I’ve spent, well, doing more important things.

So, needless to say, I was excited about Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. World of Warcraft has held my attention for a long, long time… in fact I finally decided to take some time off from it and I lasted a few months but in the last few weeks I jumped back in. But my friend Steve kept talking to me about Age of Conan and about how awesome it was going to be and I didn’t want to hear it because all MMOs begin and end with WoW. But about 2 days ago I caught the bug, it was close enough to launch (Late Monday in the USA) for me to finally give in.

Installing the game is not pretty. Well, it tricks you into thinking it is. There are two discs, how long can that take? Two hours, I found out.

And then it needs to patch, of course, which started as the slowest download I’ve had since I lived with my parents in the late 90s and had 56k. I looked into the problem and found a solution though, about 4 hours into the patch, that made it quicker*.

So anyway, that ends my story of woe. Or whoa. I got into the game, with my barely meeting the minimum requirement PC and it looked like a slide show. There was no FPS number I could give you, it literally was “here is a picture of here” and then because of whatever buttons I pressed in the interim about 5 seconds later it was “well, now you are here, and this is a picture of it.” Unplayable didn’t even begin to explain it.

So i went through the graphics settings, and tried this or that. I finally found something that looked OK enough, and played well enough, and I was on my way. The first thing that you notice, and it’s the game’s selling point, is that the combat is very different than any MMO you have ever played. It is literally in real time, when you hit slash left it slashes left. Of course if uses global cooldowns like other games, but it has this great system of where you can stack defense and where you can use offense on the fly against that defense. In short, FlipFlap can put his defense on the right side predicting that is where the swing is coming in, but if Mort (Bluesteel server, btw, hint hint) goes left where this is no defense he gets bigger chunks of damage. Right now I find it hard to manage, but right now I am level 5, everything is hard to manage.

When I can get the game to be playable (and again, my PC barely hits the min reqs) it really shines. Combat is 90% of any MMO, and AoC does it the best. But I also don’t want to short change the story I have seen so far. It is very intense, and it plays out much more cinematicly than any other MMO on the market. The game has solo instances for chirstsake, with some challenge but the main reason is to continue a story line. This is another place if pulls away from WoW. WoW better copy this.

I don’t want to go nuts right now, I am only five levels into an 80 level MMO. It may get a lot worse from here. In fact one of the zones is complete bugged and is swallowing players. But just the touch of AoC I have seen has me excited about the future, and sad that my computer can’t handle it. Anyone have a spare $600 for me to make a new machine?

Want a more in depth look at Age of Conan. Click this. And then go to that.

*If you are patching AoC just nuke your virus protection, even if you don’t think you need to. I read over and over in the forums about how that fixes it and the whole time I am thinking “I have had mine completely disabled for three years!!!1!” Well, that didn’t matter. It took me 4 hours to get 100mb of the 600mb patch. I uninstalled Norton and I got the last 500mb in about 15 minutes.