Christmas is edging ever closer, but I just don’t feel that festive at the moment. It’s weird, because I love Christmas and I’m usually super excited about it. I blame the weather.
Anyway, back to what been going on in geeky land!
The last week has actually been a pretty geeky one all round, we’ve had the VGA’s and seen who took the top prizes along with all the trailers shown and we also had PSX over the weekend where some tasty new games and trailers were shown off.
As for me, well, I’ve been trying out some new games this week. Firstly I was roped in to giving World of Warcraft a trial as you can play up to level 20 for free. I don’t really know why I’ve never played it previously – maybe it was the monthly fee and justifying the cost of it, or maybe it was because I didn’t think I would have the time to play. Whatever it was, I’ve now played and, well, my first impressions of it are… ok. It helped that I had someone playing with me for the first 20 levels. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting of it, so it was kind of hard to judge whether it lived up to.
The starting character that I chose was Night Elf.
In my first 20 levels we did a lot of quests which involved of lot of killing low level mobs, collecting resources and clearing out areas – the kind of thing you’d expect from an RPG. The first few hours felt pretty generic if I’m honest, but then again I get why they were –there’s no point in throwing a noob in to complex stuff as it would just be too overwhelming.
As soon as you hit level 15 you can try out dungeons. These are essentially areas where a group of players (I think it was 5 in total), work their way through a number of bosses to get some sweet loot. We breezed through it pretty easily and I even missed out on actually contributing anything to some bosses simply because I was looking around and getting the hang of it. Either way it was still fun and I got some sweet loot too.
Do I see myself becoming addicted to this game? No, probably not and I’m not really sure if I want to pay to play it either. Maybe I will just play for a month here and there.
A new game also hit steam on Friday called Hurtworld. It’s an online survival game and kind of reminds me of Rust with the graphics of Team Fortress. It works like many other games of the same genre, collect resources, craft items and try to survive. But there are some differences to some of the survival games I’ve played.
For instance, when you die, you don’t lose all your items, instead you lose the resources you’ve collected but keep tools and weapons you may be holding on to. But there is a twist to this – Bankroll Studios have implemented a notoriety system, meaning the higher your notoriety the more items you’ll lose upon death. I think this is in place to try and discourage people killing fresh spawns.
During my first hour I met loads of helpful people offering me tips and advice and even helping me out with some supplies. Then I got a friend involved and we went of different server. This server was full of people just wanting to kill on site. It was a little frustrating as we were trying to meet up, but eventually we managed it and made camp for the night.
Speaking of night time, if you don’t build yourself a fire place, then the chances are that you’ll die from hypothermia pretty quickly. It’s a nice change and I like that they’ve added in something that actually involves trying to survive.
I think it has a lot of promise to be a great survival game and I’m thinking I will do some kind of series on my YouTube channel at some point.
-Will
My weekend wasn’t completely taken up by computer games unfortunately. But it was still good fun.
Friday night I was taxi service for my wife as she attended a Christmas party. To kill time I headed over to a friends house where we played FIFA all evening. In the final few hours of killing time I just watched some Aziz Ansari stand up on Netflix. Not much in terms of geeky goodness Friday night.
Saturday I was going to a local wrestling show. Pro Wrestling Chaos, Local chap Alex Steele from Yate was featuring but they also boasted 2 current WWE NXT members Rhino and Tommaso Ciampa. It was a good night with plenty of drink and a great turnout.
Sunday was spent recovering from a hangover and heading out for a Christmas meal with friends. When back from that I watched 4 hours of Daredevil as I’m yet to watch it. Then I caught up with the PlayStation Experience which I missed Saturday night due to the wrestling. I was pretty happy with the offering that was on show. Some people set their expectations too high for events like this. The reveal of Ni No Kuni 2 and Ace Combat 7 was pretty awesome though. Nioh is looking like the spiritual successor to Onimusha we’ve all been wanting and Final Fantasy 7 Remake looks incredible. Overall a good show to me. Will be getting a summary of Playstation Experience up on the site later (better late than never right?)
– Murr
