Uzghul’s view on the gaming world

Yesterday I downloaded the HAWX PC Demo. The game looks very nice, and as an old flightsim enthousiastic I loved it quite a lot. It’s just two levels so I just gotta fix something where my camera takes a weird angle when I remove the air assistance. Looks really promising and on my list of “Games to buy in 2009″!

Every month I make my own little list of the games that I am really looking forward to. With E3 coming up and a lot of new announcements, I think it’s best to do it before I got a list of two pages

So, in no particular order:

Street Fighter IV
Diablo III
Starcraft II
Crysis : Warhead
World of Warcraft : Wrath of the Lich King
Duke Nukem Forever
Guitar Hero : Metallica

You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting. In what world could you possibly beat me? God I love that movie!

This quote actually explains how I felt about Assasin’s Creed. I bought it because everyone told me I should, and after 30 minutes I got bored with the game and put it aside. I’m an action guy, and this game just lacked action. 48 euro’s down the drain. Or not? When I went on holiday (no internet there) I started playing it again and continued where I stopped. After getting used to the controls (and visiting my first city) things finally got interesting. Running on the roofs, pickpocketing people, saving lady citizens in distress, what more could you want. Insane graphics? Check. A cool main character? Check. Some hot bimbo that likes you? Check. And the checklist continues with great stuff.

Nothing is as nice as going on top of a high tower and seeing the world beneath you, only to take a leap of faith and jump down the entire tower into the hay. But how did you get there? The story puts you in the place of a regular guy in the future whose DNA contains information that a certain organisation, who is holding you hostage, needs. By putting yourself into a machine, you can replay the life of your great great great …. grandfather, an assassin. I’m not going to explain it further, it’s kind of interesting to discover it yourself.

Nice graphics, nice story, nice characters, nice moves, weird controls that you somehow get used to after a while and are actually pretty nice, isn’t there anything bad? Yes there is. First of all after a while the missions get quite repetetive. Gather enough intel about the target you need to kill, kill it, next. Your mission is to kill nice high placed figures, and most of them are rather easy to kill. The last one though has an insane difficulty factor compared to the other ones.

So you killed the last boss, do some other stuff after that in the life of your great great…grandfather (can’t say what as it is the end of the story). Then the game shifts back to the future, and as you are taken hostage by the organisation that is inspecting your dna, you expect that FINALLY you can use all the skills you learned during your trips in the past to kick ass in the future and escape the organisation. Nope. The game just stops with a major cliffhanger and I guess I have to wait till Assassin’s Creed II to know how it will continue. So yep, great game, with a major cold shower at the end. I will buy part II, but as they make me wait till II releases, I’ll just wait a bit more until it goes into Best Buy. I bought a game, not a soap.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since the Beta came out, starting as a small gnome mage to result into an orc rogue on horde side. I don’t think, apart from the holidays, a week has passed when I did not log into the game, to talk with people, to play a bit, or to farm money. Up until the moment that I joined a “raiding guild” all about it was casual playing around with some friends. The moment I joined a raiding guild the game experience changed. Instead of chosing when to play, I found myself racing home to be in time for the raid, and to be able to quickly farm a few flasks to actually be able to raid. In a nutshell, my wow life existed of coming home, farming, raiding and farming after the raid, to be able to pay repairs and to not be yelled at for not having any potions. Great was the relief when we decided to stop raiding one or two months before The Burning Crusade hit us. A lot of chilling, some pvp, and nothing more. No more stress

The moment TBC arrived, it just started all over. I was one of those standing at the store at midnight waiting for it to open to buy my expansion of World of Warcraft. Home 15 minutes later to install my version and play till 3a.m and then off to work. Racing to level 70 only to see that the top guilds already had people running around with epics (Exalted Aldor) and racing myself through the Karazhan prequest. And all over again, coming home, farming, raiding and raidleading, officer discussing after, farming, and off to work. Problems arose in the guild, I sorted the merger and the conditions of our guild with another guild and on it went again. If I see who was playing with me through the entire track from Karazhan to sunwell, there aren’t many left. Lots of new people joined our team and got geared up, without having to go through all the instances I went through. And now, they got the same gear as me. Having spend so much time on WoW only to see the casual people running around with the same gear is something quite annoying, but it is mainly due to the people’s lack of respect for their guildies when leaving for a guild that is 2 bosses further than due to those newcomers.

So when the baby was born, I gave up raiding. I considered giving up WoW alltogether but I still enjoy the game too much. And not playing WoW would result in playing another game, so I preferred to use the time I already put in the game and focused on Arena. Yes, I still play on certain fixed times, but no need for potions, no insane repair costs, and with the recent changes a REAL display of your skill and what you did (wintraders not counted) instead of everyone running around in Tier6 (a bit exaggerated, but it’s insane how many people we gear up from t4). And only 1,2 or 4 people have to wait a bit when the baby needs attention. So yes, World of Warcraft is still worth it. Raiding is fun, it’s just insane how much of your time it takes to do it properly. I still raid when they really need me, but for the rest I’m chilling in WoW, got time to spend with my kid and I still got nice gear to show off that after all this time I learned how to play