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Far Cry 2 Cover

Open world game play is all the rage. The industry has decided that linear is out and that open ended randomness is in! The issue being of course that it detracts from the over all story and game play something awful.. of course gameplay also appears to be out right now, so no big loss … but I get ahead of myself..

Over the weekend I picked up Farcry 2.  I wasn’t on the original Farcry boat.. For whatever reason that game came and went long before I ever saw it.  When I finally did get my grubby hands on it, I had just played HL2 and was jonesing for some extra action.. needless to say it didn’t do much for me..   But I could see the potential!  And certainly why it was thought of as awesome.. It was still pretty good for an older game..

Now that Farcry 2 is out I was one of the first ones on the band wagon.  I downloaded the game from direct2drive and had it installed and playing in fairly short order.

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Shooting themselves in the foot? Mmm maybe.. I’m an avid MMO player and ever since Cryptic first announced City of Heroes back in 2002(?) I was in love with the idea of a super hero MMO. It really seems that all modern MMO’s are fantasy based, and I have said for a while that I’m pretty fantasy-ed out.

Cryptic had sold CoH to the masses as this do anything engine that would mirror “Champions” the role playing game, without actually saying the word champions. And to be honest, it turned out to be much less than champions. Still a good game, but not the freeform system that everyone envisioned. Lots of work and updates went into the game and it’s still pretty fun. I still play it.

In November of 2007 Cryptic sold their ownership of the CoH and City of Villains franchise to NCSoft so that they could work on their new super secret project!
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I play Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy table top games. I also used to play the Warhammer fantasy role playing game when I was in highschool.. Right now I’m doing my damnedest to assemble and paint models for my new Warhammer 40k Orks Army.

I love those little green bastards but I have a billion of them to paint.. (Okay, a billion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.) Over the years I have had Necron, Tau and Orks as my 40K armies, and Orcs & Goblins, Skaven and Tomb Kings as my Fantasy armies. I played the role playing game for years and really preferred it to D&D or any of the other traditional role playing systems..

I tell you this so that you will come away with the understanding that I have a pretty good idea about the Warhammer universe and to convey to you how absolutely excited I was about Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning. I had long thought this universe was ripe for computer games.

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So I find I have been playing quite a few web based games of late. And just about all of them has brought to the fore of my mind the glaring fact that there is nothing they have done that I can’t do. Seriously. More over, I think I can do it better in just about every way.

One of the games I find myself playing is a space game which, to be fair, isn’t very good — in fact it’s bad. It’s just not a very good game, yet for some reason I find myself continuing to play it — as does a lot of other folks. It’s strangely popular. While playing at just about every turn I see things that could not only be done a little better, but done WAY better. Not just game play wise, but technically as well. Their HTML is bad, they clearly don’t understand CSS and their PHP is poorly written (from what I can tell.) So, this of course always lead me to the line of thinking that, why shouldn’t I try to make my own?

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Spore is a multi-genre massively single-player online game designed by Will Wright and has drawn quite a lot of attention due to its massive scope and open ended game play.  Add to that the ability of users to customize completely their .. well everything .. from the ground up and you have a very interesting sandbox game (something Will Wright is known for.)

Spore’s major concept, and the reason they call it a “massively single-player online game” is because all of the content is created by players using editors that are a cross between the “play doh fun factory” and Maya 3d modeling software.  All of the editors are designed to be easy to use and powerful, as well as being as similar as possible to one another so that each lesson you learn in one part of the editor can be applied to another part. continue reading…

City of Heroes (and thus City of Villains) is one of those sleeper games that has a lot of hidden depth. I played CoH for almost a year starting back in Feb. 2005 when it first came out. I like to refer to it as MMO Lite.

It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh) continue reading…