A Rift in the MMO-Verse

So I have discovered today that the popular new massively multiplayer role playing game, Rift by Trion Worlds for the Personal Computer, now offers a 7-day free trial. From what I have heard and seen of the game, it is not a replacement for World of Warcraft - in this genre, WoW will forever be king - so it is a bit weird that I am actually taking the time to download the game when I could not even convince myself to get into WoW again. The thing about MMOs is that they tend to take a lot of your time away from other games but I always like to give games a chance so I suppose it is just in my nature to proceed with this venture. The patch for the game is close to 9GB so if you are interested, perhaps it is best to start downloading before you go to sleep. To sign up for the free trial, click here - and I wish you good luck!

When you realize that you can't compete with WoW, it's time to open up the free trials!

Meet Squad 1

As you could probably gather from my impression of the beta, I really like Darkspore. The way that it tweaks the dungeon crawling formula by providing you with seemingly never ending ways to change your heroes' looks is unlike anything that I have encountered in the genre before. Imagine if you could play around with the size of the cool looking shoulder pads for your wizard or that shiny chest armor of your warrior - wouldn't that make the dungeon crawler a lot more fun? Well that is exactly what developer Maxis has accomplished here. Even with the game's strong hero customization options though, I have not seen a lot of people getting creative with the tools provided with the game. It's probably because I am still playing through the first of the game's three tiered difficulty levels and if that was the case, I really should play this game a lot more so that I can finally get to see some crazy hero edits. Of course, I for one just cannot wait to eventually unlock all the customization options myself so that I can expand my own brand of creativity upon my heroes. Speaking of that, I want to introduced you to some of my heroes who are teamed up to form Squad 1. This should give you a good idea of the level of flexibility you are given by the edit tools and it will further exemplify my love for creating ugly looking things. Note that some of the alterations here are not even accomplished via full equipment of items and accessories but merely by moving and changing parts that are already on the heroes' bodies.

Blitz: Before

Blitz: After

Viper: Before

Viper: After

Maldri: Before

Maldri: After

Review: The Last Pod Fighter

The Indie Games section of the X-Box 360 LIVE service is a very crowded marketplace filled with many bizarre creations that could be good, bad, or just plain rotten. When this section was first introduced to LIVE, I was mildly intrigued because of its potential to be a portal to unending creativity. Unfortunately, after the never ending number of "vibration massage" games, my interest in the 360's indie scene waned down and I haven't even bothered with them for the longest time until my friend, who is a member of developer Fighter9, provided me with an opportunity to play The Last Pod Fighter, their new game that just hit the Indie Game Marketplace just two days ago.

The Last Pod Fighter is your typical variant of a 3D space shooter where you control a ship in a full 3D environment. You basically have to fight waves after waves of enemy ships and these are punctuated by boss battles where you have to destroy a large capital ship. It is all very elementary and the auto lock-on system makes things very accessible. There are many power up pods that attach themselves to your ship - these are dropped off by destroyed enemy ships - and some of them are actually pretty cool to use, like the "Gravity Pod" that sucks up enemies that are close to it. The game comes with two gameplay modes: Arcade and Survival. The former is divided into rounds and the latter is about how long you can last the non-stop viscous waves of enemies trying to destroy you. Both of them are fun to play with the time and score counters being great reasons to replay the game as you try to beat your own records on your next play session. Graphically, the game looks decent but sometimes, all the flying lasers, swirling power-ups, and large explosions almost made the game kind of pretty. The real problem with the game's visual presentation is that you are stuck playing the game in only one environment: you end up seeing the same planet and asteroid formations. There is also this illusion that you are hardly moving forward because there are not enough particles moving into the screen, which can be a bit distracting.

I always appreciate big bosses!

Despite those small complaints, The Last Pod Fighter is a fun and engaging game. I haven't mentioned that it has a really strong soundtrack - worth the price of admission in itself - and the sound effects sound expensive . It was shared with me that the game may receive an online multiplayer expansion - which would make the game a lot better - but whether or not that will come into fruition, the game is a dollar (80 Microsoft Points) worth spent if you are looking for a little arcade shooter action.

RATING: 4 out of 5

Game key provided by developer.

7... in Inches

Yesterday, I made what could be a questionable transition to Windows Vista. I decided to be a bit adventurous since I know that my free upgrade to 7 may not arrive anytime soon just so that I can reap some of the benefits of DirectX 10/11 and Nvidia's 3D Vision technology that my last two graphics cards are capable of supporting. I have access to installing Vista for quite some time now but I originally just wanted to wait for the big jump to 7. I was too cautious in my transition to Vista however and that had caused me a lot more headaches than necessary. I decided to dual-boot Windows XP and Vista because I wanted to be certain before I commit to the new operating system since it got some really bad press - though not as bad as Windows XP 64-bit however and that OS turned out to be alright in my book. Creating the dual-boot was easy enough but the partition management that came after during the finalization of my Vista setup makes me want to bash Kratos in the head with a big slab of rock.

A risky move or a well-calculated one?

So far, I really do like Vista. It is quite fast and my games, the two that I have tested on so far (guess one of the games), ran smoothly without a hitch. I played a bit of Two Worlds II to check out the DirectX 10 benefits and though they are noticeable - the armor details really popped out and there are now more geometries to them - they don't make the DirectX 9 version look ugly. Instead, the DirectX 9 version just looks slightly edited down. As far as Nvidia 3D Vision goes, I don't have those expensive shutter glasses and 3D-compatible displays of course so I have it set to the red/blue anaglyph mode. It looked really horrible on Two Worlds II but League of Legends fared pretty well on it actually (yes, you guessed the game right) but both of these are not officially supported by the program to begin with. Some of the 3D game screenshots provided by the program look amazing so I am looking forward to test out the 3D action of games that are optimized for the technology. I have used the shutter glasses for 3D Vision before at a store display and the 3D definitely looked awesome but you know what? They still can't compare to the marvelous depth and ease of the Nintendo 3DS brand of 3D... Anyway, so everything is going well with the Vista "upgrade" so far - I am going to leave that word in quotation marks for now - and hopefully my Personal Computer gaming experience will be further enhanced by it.

Anaglyph glasses are so... stylish. No wonder Nintendo stayed away from them.

Is My 360 Dead Without LIVE Gold?

My recent one game deduction in the form of Super Street Fighter IV for the X-Box 360 has made me wonder how far-fetch the impact of my decision to leave X-Box LIVE Gold truly is. The main reason why I sold my copy of SSFIV was because I don't have access to the online multiplayer feature and upgrading it to the upcoming Arcade Edition is still not going to remedy the situation. Thus, I should just pick up the Personal Computer version so I can get back to playing it online. Things would have been different if I actually have real people to play it with in my Game Room, in which I don't. As we all know, online multiplayer can be an overwhelmingly large part of a game so I have decided to do a complete analysis of my 360 Game Library to have a clear understanding of the situation.

Is the Deathsmiles faceplate an omen of the console's dark fate?

To accomplish that goal, I went through every single one of my 196 games on the 360, including the digital downloads and categorize them into 2 groups: a) games that have online multiplayer functionalities and b) games that have strong single player elements that overshadow the online features or they don't have online functionalities whatsoever. The verdict: only 32 games have overwhelmingly dominant multiplayer elements and that is just roughly 16% of the total. These games include Gears of War I & II, the Halo series, and Resident Evil 5. This doesn't mean that the other 164 games have no online features - Mushihimesama Futari Ver 1.5 for example has a great online leaderboard but it is a vital core of the game? No, because I don't have to look at other people's high score to encourage me to perform better in the game. It is still a fact however than I am missing out on some of the online-related contents found in these 164 games - at least these omissions are not critical to the overall gaming experience.

In conclusion, the loss is not as devastating as I expected it to be but without LIVE Gold, I can only expect a significant decline in the number of games I will get for the system in the future. There are a couple of worries I do have in regards to keeping myself away from LIVE Gold. The first being a small number of good friends I have who only play on the 360: These individuals still have that power to persuade me to come back so that I could play online games with them again. The second being Gears of War III: The first two games have some of the best co-op I have ever played and I would hate to miss out on the co-op action of GoWIII. All of a sudden, the prospect of staying away from LIVE Gold is not as easy as it originally seemed to be but the fact of the matter is, only time will tell.