February 19th, 2010 by dace

Blizzard announced the sale of two new in-game pets through the Blizzard store back in November of last year, with one pet, the Pandaren Monk, to have 50% of its proceeds (from sales up until the end of 2009) donated to the Make-A-Wish foundation.

Today, Blizzard announced via twitter that Pandaren Monk sales have amounted to a $1.1 million donation to the Make-A-Wish foundation!

February 10th, 2010 by dace

The reputation of Half-Life precedes all conversations about Half-Life 2.  You see, Half-Life set a new paradigm for PC gaming and video game development in general when it was released on an unsuspecting public back in 1998.  It didn’t just make a splash in the industry—it cannon balled at light-speed and created a tsunami that swept across the whole world.

What made Half-Life so great?  It was the first-ever gaming achievement to achieve total immersion in an environment.  Though HL did rely heavily on scripted sequences, players felt they were right there in the game.  The opening sequence alone was extremely entertaining despite the fact that it took about 10-20 minutes before the real action started.  People would hold conversations with each other, players could walk around a fully functioning research lab, and most items in the environment were interactive.  As the game progressed, gameplay was unique in that the levels had a very non-linear design that encouraged players to take advantage of the environment.  The single player campaign was an engrossing story that took many hours to complete.  By the end of it, players were starving for more, but they’ve had to wait until now to see the sequel!

Of course, in the meantime, Half-Life was revolutionary for other reasons.  For one thing, Valve actively encouraged the modification scene by providing home users with development kits that could be used to create ’mods’ of the game.  Popular modifications include the #1 multiplayer game of all time: Counter-Strike.  CS was a simple idea spawned from early mods of Quake II like Action Quake 2.  Players were pitted against rival teams and could choose from a wide variety of weaponry to destroy each other.  Each level had objectives, like disarm the bomb, kill the other team, or blow up sometime.

Ah, but I’m rambling now about Half-Life when I should really talk about Half-Life 2.  HL2 promises to shake the foundations of the PC game industry once more by taking the whole story one step further.  This time, a revolutionary new graphics and physics engine promises to create a true virtual world where EVERYTHING is simulated correctly.  Players will experience full interactivity for the first time in any video game.  Every single object is movable, and is modeled exactly for the kind of material it’s made of.  Light objects tossed into the water will float, while heavy objects will splash around and slowly sink.  You can even push a table up against a door to barricade yourself against the enemy while you watch them try to smash through or get through a nearby window.

Computer AI is also touted to be extremely smart and dynamic in responding to changing situations.  The graphics just look amazing too.  All player models are photorealistic with proper speech-lip synching and a full range of facial expressions. Half-Life 2 comes out on November 16, and while it may not rack up as many sales as GTA: San Andreas or Halo 2, I’m sure it will make an entrance worth remembering.

February 10th, 2010 by dace

This is the second part of the first impression of Mortal Online.

Finally when entering the game world you will find yourself alone in the streets near a town trying to figure what the hell is going down. Looking around I saw some players naked or dressed like Neanderthals flying from the top of a house – some kind of bug, rendering problem no idea, but a superb first impression nevertheless. Here you get no direction, no storyline, you are alone, your mom and dad kicked you out on the streets because you were bad, and now it’s up to you to survive. There is a help window that teaches you the basics on how to move, accessing inventory, and so on, like a knowledge base, but the introduction to this “tech demo” makes you wish to quit and uninstall. Now let me be clear here, even sandbox games must have a introduction system that gets the player in the world, teaches him the basic, makes him feel that he is exploring a new world, a huge one, with infinite possibilities. Having just a help window somewhere is useless, the player is not convinced that this is a living, interesting virtual world to explore. Indeed the outdoor graphics are good enough to keep you interested, but the performance is horrible. I believe they are huge memory leaks in the client, since at some point with many players near me (5-10), the client started to go from 50 FPS to 5, and sometimes it crashed. It could be only my problem but I doubt it, since I play most of today’s games on high details and Unreal is very good engine on good hands.

Tweaking with the engine and support I finally got some decent performance by reducing the maxLODsize from 4096 to 512 in nowengine.ini. This was my first sandbox quest, see? Since the programmers couldn’t implement graphic customization, only texture and shadows.

I explored the nearby town where some players were gathering materials from the air, since collision system it’s mess. Went outside the town and on the good side the outdoor environment is incredible, it’s huge, has good graphics and no loading screens. While outside the town I watched a player fighting some mobs and neither of them had a combat animation: they player just went to the pig, and the pig died. It could be lag or another “feature”.

After this I considered I had enough. I spent 3 hours in game only to be frustrated, quit and uninstall. So do I recommend this game to you the players? Well I’d say stay away from it unless you are real huge fan and you like unfinished games – this one seemed like an Alpha to me. I understand that they are indie developers but when you release a version to show the game to the world you have to show something decent, that has decent game design, level design, basic collision and animations.

“You WOW newb!” Wait! Wait! I am actually one of the hardcore players that love harsh PVP and sandbox games, where two of my favorite sandbox games are Mount and Blade and EVE Online (played 4 years), but there is a limit to how much trash I can take from a game while paying for it.

The game is still in open beta so don’t take my word for it, try the game, make your own opinion.

February 9th, 2010 by dace

I really like indie companies because I know how hard is to make a game without a huge financial power and in the same time some of the best games I ever played were made by indie companies, or at least small companies. Unfortunately not all indie games have the design power and industry knowledge to release a polished or complete product. Sometimes this happens because of poor management or low financial backup and sometimes because the main developers are not that good at what they do.

Mortal Online wants to be a pure sandbox PVP mmorpg, much like Ultima back in the days, but it fails horribly right from the start. I followed the game, saw some videos, screenshots, I was expecting something decent or even great, only to find a tech buggy demo which they call open beta. While I am not a big fan of accessibility sessions and I’ve been to some of them, these developers clearly never heard of the concept or they don’t understand the basic game design principles, probably both.

From the start you are thrown into the character creation screen naked, with some basic options to change his appearance, but you barely succeed on doing anything. Moving on you get to choose your race, location, skills, and some kind of of class option, but from all these pages you get absolutely no info, tooltips, you might as well be blind. At the end you can enter you character name and choose a start location from multiple options that have zero information attached to them as well where some even have place holder description “Location Description to come…”

To be continued..

February 8th, 2010 by dace

The first images of the Female Monk from Diablo III have been revealed in the latest episode of the Jace Hall Show, released exclusively at the 7:25 minute mark, the character artwork is clearly shown of a blond character with metallic shoulder pads. Three further images are shown, including the female monk in a combat stance, as well as the progression of her clothing from basic gear to heavy armor. Jay Wilson, the game director of Diablo III, mentions that these images have not been seen anywhere.

This would not be the first time that a female version of a Diablo III character has been shown. The game’s website is currently depicting a female version of the wizard class on its homepage, as well as concept art of the female barbarian. We contacted Blizzard for a statement, and received word from a spokesman that a female Monk will indeed be part of Diablo III.