Balaji’s Blog

PC aficionado!

Well since I’ve finally begun adding to my game collection again, I’ve crossed the 50 game mark – woo hoo!

And that means I now qualify as PC aficionado as per Gamespot .. check it out:

I totally rule

Inane Game Review

Unfortunately I can’t provide a link for this post, since this is a review that appeared in a newspaper.

A local newspaper called “Today” published a review of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion yesterday and I think it easily qualifies as the dumbest review of a RPG ever written.

It started off well enough saying “Once in a blue moon, there comes along one game that seems to get almost everything right”.. Completely true I’d say

A paragraph in it says “the potential greatness of the Elder Scrolls is evident right from the start (sic) You can customise just about everything – from the class, face features, hair, skin colour and even the jaw-to-face ratio”. Okay, first of all, any goddamn RPG or MMO these days offers incredible customization of the player character (World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, GTA:SA and so on). Note that the reviewer hasn’t said anything about the actual different races the player can choose as part of the review of character creation.

After this, there is a brief intro to the initial part of the game, the reviewer talks about the game graphics, side-quests, a brief mention of the voice acting (whose? the player’s? the NPCs?). Abruptly, he mentions “the game will even recommendd a new player class for you after observing how you play”. First up, what is this sentence doing after talking about graphics? Next, why isn’t this part of the paragraph on the initial part of the game?

A brief discussion on improved combat follows and then praise for the replay value (here briefly, the several races a player can choose are mentioned – 80% of the way into the review and only briefly).  There is some criticism of the loading times of the game, which is fairly true.

Before I come to my favourite part of the review, let’s review what not’s been talked about so far shall we:

1. What’s better in Oblivion compared to Morrowind?
2. The fantastic NPCs of Oblivion
3. The Mage Brotherhood, which is sort of the main point of the game.
4. The main point of the game! Yes ladies and gentleman, the entire review hasn’t mentioned what is Oblivion, or the Hell Gates at all!

And now for my absolute favorite part of the review – this line “In addition, there is no multiplayer option”. At first I thought maybe the reviewer was joking, like gamespot did in its review. But then I look down at the game summary, and in the Cons for the game, it’s there again – No multiplayer option. WTF? I mean WTF???? Does this reviewer even know what a typical RPG is?? Or is he some pimply faced youth, whose idea of a “great game” is Halo on the Xbox where he can smack-talk and indulge in modem standby, while believing himself to be the L33T gamer who can pass judgement on every game that crosses his desk?

I understand that newspapers have restrictions on length of articles which would force the reviewer to skip certain points, but honestly, I think Oblivion would have been better served not being reviewed by this newspaper than being subjected to this mockery of a review :-X

No multiplayer..god :-&

Oblivion Fever

I have been remiss in posting stuff to my blog these last few days – the reason being, I have been spending the little free time I get to post on researching Oblivion.

I am thoroughly obsessed with this game now – it’s amazing looks and truly immersive role play experience. I will be getting my hands on the game early next week, but what I’ve been researching is – how to get it to play on my laptop and the mods I’d like to install once I get the game.

My laptop barely qualifies to play the game with it’s current specs:

• AMD Turion ML-30 1.6Ghz
• 640 MB RAM (That odd number is a long story)
• Radeon Express 200 Integrated Graphics with 128MB RAM

Mostly, it’s the integrated graphics card that’s the killer. So I have been checking out the Oldblivion forums to understand what I’d need to do to get the game to run. It appears the game will run with Oldblivion installed on my laptop, but right now I have no idea how good it will be.

Other mods I’m thinking about right now are also aimed at prettying up the environment on lower end PCs such as the Natural Environment Mod and the improved water textures mod.

Okay, time to file some links in del.icio.us

Ogame – or does a persistent MMORTS make sense?

So here is the first in an overdue series of articles that I had put up over a month ago so that I would get off my lazy so-and-so and actually write something.

A few months back, I had been looking around for a free browser-based game that I could play during my lunch break. It had to be browser-based because I have only HTTP access at work and free,cuz well .

Since I am a HUGE strategy game fan, I was eagerly looking for a RTS game and I was very happy to find OGame.

OGame originally started in Germany and is a space RTS. You start with a planet on which you collect 3 resources (Metal, Crystal and Deuterium) for which you need power (either using Solar Plants, Satellites or Fusion plants). Once you have collected sufficient resources, you can build research labs and shipyards.

Now this is classic RTS stuff and I dived right in – I should mention that OGame has a fairly attractive interface for a web-based game and I found that a pleasant surprise. Ogame also has “noob protection” built in, so you are safe from high-level griefers while you are still levelling up.

For those of you interested in playing Ogame, I recommend this site – it’s a very useful collection of tips.

As is my wont, I spent a fair bit of time turtling in my home planet building up my defences. A few weeks later, I launched my first attack – and even though it was against a idle player, it was the most nerve-racking 3 hours of my life (OGame plays in realtime, so if the game says 3 hours to reach a planet, it will take 3 hours). At this point, I was completely sold on the persistent RTS experience.

About 2 months into my Ogame experience, I went past the 5000-point mark and that meant the gloves were off and I was fair game for all the high level players. And that;s when it sinks in – since Ogame is a persistent RTS, you can be attacked at any time.. even when you are not playing.

Now I had heard about ‘fleet-saving” from ogame-tips, so I would faithfully log in every day, load all my resources on my fleet and send it off really slow to some debris field, so that no-one could attack it.

Unfortuantely, that isn’t a guaranteed method for escaping attack and sure enough, I missed doing this one day and almost immediately, a high-level player executed a classic “fleet-crash” (attacking a smaller fleet with an obscenely large fleet to collect the resources that become “debris” when the smaller fleet is destroyed).

So 2 1/2 months into the game, I had my home planet, 2 small planets and about 50% of my defences. Over the next 2 weeks, I poured all my resources into re-building my fleet and thinking dark thoughts about the player who had crashed me and vowed, one day, I’d get “even”.

So I had finally re-built my fleet to back where it was, but that just meant I was fair game again. Back on the “Fleet-save” treadmill again. And this time I guess it was worse, since I knew what happens to mid-level players that don’t remember to “fleet-save”.

And so it was, one saturday afternoon, out shopping, I found myself in a panicky search for a Internet cafe. Why? Cuz I had just remembered my fleet was due back any minute and I didn’t want another crash. I log in, fleet save again and then my brain starts working again.

The next day, I log in at 8PM in the night, just so I can “fleet save”.

Monday afternoon, I find myself logging in and thinking “Why the fuck am I doing this? Where’s the fun in this?”. Over the previous 3 days, I had caught myself thinking many times “Is it my time for my fleet to return?”. For a married guy, working 11 hours a day, that’s too much time spent thinking about gaming in the little time he gets to spend with family.

I deleted my Ogame account that Monday afternoon and have never looked back.

Looking back, I think I finally get why all the big titles (starting from Age of Empires upto Civ IV) only support PvP play and have never branched out into supporting any kind of persistent gaming. The thought of knowing you could be attacked and not be able to do nothing kinda kills the point of the game.

Postscript:

Still looking for a free browser-based game that I could play for 5-10 minutes at a time, I came across Star Wars Combine.

It’s an MMORPG set in the Star Wars Universe, somewhere in the time before Episode IV. Plays in realtime as well and many features like combat and items (MMO staples) are still missing.

But it’s quick, it’s free and I can log-off without ever having to worry that my character will be dead by the time I log in again.