There are 3 levels of play and within each of those levels are 14 of game types, each is unique and has it’s own benefits and pitfalls. Despite playing the same style of track then difference between the game types is one of the reasons the game remains exciting and enjoyable.

As well as playing DRM-free music on your machine you can play songs from AudioSurf radio or you can opt to play a track from the Orange Box soundtrack which covers the music from the Value games Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

A sequel called AudioSurf Air was announce earlier this year, the visuals look good but may indicate the game is moving to an even more Wipeout style track. I hope that the core game elements remain the same otherwise I’ll just have to keep booting up the older version forever more.

If you haven’t played it you can find in on Steam for £5.99 at the moment, but it does normally make an appearing in the Steam sales.

However I was discussing with my wife the recent announcement by King’s Isle about their new MMO in development. Pirate 101 looks to be using the same model but with a pirate theme, what with it being all the rage at the moment. Of course it comes with the high number of safety features that if you have played Wizard 101 you will be familiar with.

I do hope that games like Wizard & Pirate 101 are still going strong and hopefully joined by a wider collection of titles as our child gets to the age where online gaming is something he wants to participate in.

I just hope they get Brian Blessed to voice one of the pirates

GameSpace – It wasn’t long ago that I was having a conversation with Dok about the poor use of game worlds in terms of quests,traveling and how phasing could make better use of the game environments avoiding the “Quest giver hub” and the “quest target areas”. I use rift as an example as the starting areas are huge yet you perform a handful of quests in an area never to return.
The non-standard quest givers and tiered quest system in The Secret World means you are frequently heading to new parts of the map, as well as looking at new areas in a new light.

Investigations – The game has quests that need you to use your head a little, logical clues makes for some good entertainment that not just your normal mmo gaming event, they may need you to break the clue down into more basic elements or Google a name to get help (sporting an in-game browser for that very reason). A good example was this evening when Dok and I tackled one of the main investigations in Kingsmouth, each step was tough but great fun. Lore-whoring FTW!

Quest Cool downs – Missions have 24 hour cool down that means if you group up with someone else who is working on a mission you have already completed, you can either grab it again or ask someone to share. This allows you to help them out but still get yourself a reward for doing so. This makes grouping so much easier for everyone.

Seven/Seven – The skills method have been already detailed before, and in the beta the upper levels were locked so I didn’t really get too much feeling for how these are going to work. That said Guild Wars player will already have the swapping build system in mind and focusing your powers into powerful combination is an art in itself.
I do expect Flavour of the Month builds to be common place, but with wider variations as players customise more to their play-style and grouping needs.

Highlight 1

TSW has been promoting their no-level progression system and to be fair I always took this with a pinch of salt as this often translates into “we refuse to call them levels but the mechanics are the same”. However TSW have managed to pull it off in a rather successful way.

To sum up my play-style, I’m a lore whore, hovering up any story lines and quest arcs whenever possible but as I reminded during my recent playing of Swtor, this often results in you over-levelling can the foes you encounter are weaker and present no challenge.

With TSW I played my normal path and picked up quests as frequently as possible (there is a low capacity for quests) and it felt very natural that the location/game content still matched. Enemies were still hitting me just as hard, despite me having some new skills to use against them.

Hightlight 2

Quests give a quick indicator that tell you how many parts it comprises of, this feature is good for juggling long and short term missions, plus in the one area in use this weekend, quests originate from investigations and not just contacts, which at first I thought was gimmicky but it’s not over used (yet) and the quests are very varied.

Highlight 3

The game uses much phasing to delivery a good experience for the player, despite there being a high volume of players in the area I didn’t feel that my quests were impacted by this. Only once did I have to wait for a clicky to respawn and it was only between 5 and 10 seconds.

We’ll that’s my first post complete, nothing magic but certainly a good start to the game.

The game allows mixed faction grouping so why can you be part of a group who wants players from all societies to interact, discuss tactics, arrange events and generally have a good time. It frustrated me that I can’t plan to play with friends who are in other societies and cabals. I didn’t what to set up a whole guild/clan required players to dedicate time under a banner of my making, more that I wanted to offer players a way to coordinate with virtual friends who maybe haven’t followed the same society.

So I present to you The BlastShield Consortium, a non-traditional group to bring gamers together for PvE adventures.

So if you are without a clan/guild/cabal for the upcoming beta events or are just looking for somewhere different to coordinate your game play why not give us a visit?

The game has recently started it’s 3rd week with the battle currently raging over all of Africa, while the factions attempt to retain control of their base countries and states. The previous week was all about taking and holding the opposing factions territories, which saw the map a patchwork of red, green and blue.

I believe that I’ve only got one more rank to achieve in the War which is Secret Agent, I’m not sure how long the war is actually running but once I’ve achieved the top rung I think that’s in for me unless there is a hidden bonus levels or content I’m unaware of.

Those playing need to remember to link their Secret War account to their Funcom Secret World account otherwise how are you going to claim all those goodies. You can find the link to do this your original sign up email but Funcom also email you at certain milestones, with a helpful reminder included.

Once you have done that you can quickly view the items you have earnt from participating in the war, it looks as if you have been raiding the cash shop early.

Read all about straight from the horses mouth over at Biobreak where Syp explains it better than I ever could.

This is a great way to encourage more gamers to get into blogging and we shall all have new blogs to catch up on, hopefully in my case it will shame me into posting more frequently.

Good luck to everyone giving it a go

Like many players I was over the moon about the news that Guild War 2 was a going to be a reality, I signed up to follow the updates and read up on the lore, backstory, enjoyed the Eye of the North content, that encouraging players to earn content for their Hall of Monuments.

I think my enthusiasm started to wane when they linked the Hall of Monuments to the GW2 reward calculator. Sadly I never got back that drive to for the game, which is a shame as many sources indicate that GW2 is a great experience. For now it will go into the “Pick it up later” pile.

So my money was given to FunCom for their new MMO The Secret World which is scheduled for launch on the 19th June. One of the biggest selling points for me was that it’s not a fantasy themed game and at this juncture in my gaming experience I seem to be shying away from that genre. I’ve been playing SW:ToR (post to follow) which has really handled the gun-play in a great way.

A nice move has been that if you pre-order TSW, play the beta weekend and then think you really wanted one of the pre-order “booster packs”, you can just upgrade your account with those packs rather that feeling that you missed out.

So aside from Pre-ordering TSW I have been also playing FunComs facebook driven Flash game called The Secret War, this allows players to earn small game unlocks such as clothing, xp boosters and other trinkets. Nothing game changing but certainly nice to show-offs at launch with the other people running around with the same items.

The aim is to distribute 1 million books between hospitals, prisons, care homes & communities and to ultimately share the joy of reading. Each year 25 books are chosen and “givers” are tasked with giving away 24 copies of their selected book to those who don’t regularly read.

Each book has a code that can be entered onto the WBN website and tracked, once finished and tracked readers are encouraged to give the the book to someone they think may enjoy it.

I have not long completed the task of writing the details into the first page of each book and they are all ready to be handed out. I’m a little freaked out as on paper 24 books sounded easy but now they are in my house I’m not so sure. But I remain hopeful that I can hand out all of them before the 23rd April which is when World Book Night is celebrated.

It had been sometime since I investigated graphic cards in any depth so I had a bit of investigation to learn about the newer card. I’ve been an Nvidia fan for some time now, but I didn’t immediately discard ATI/AMD cards but from the experience of friends and online reports about the drivers swayed me from AMD cards once more.

I never favour the high-end/bleeding edge cards, mostly as the cost is beyond what I’m comfortable paying and as with most things I like to purchase hardware that has been tried, tested, tweaked and offers the best in a category. The Zotac card was getting some good reviews and the differences between the 560 and the 570 were mainly in the price, with fractional differences in performance.

The first card I received was fine for the first 3 weeks but then I started seeing artefacts in Skyrim. I did the usual strip down of my machine and temperature checks and confirmed the problems was likely to be with the card. Swapping back to my original card verified this
I say that in all the year I have used online websites to purchase electronic items this was the first time I had ever needed to evoke a returns process. Thankfully the returns policy at Ebuyer is rather well documented and pretty easy to follow.

A replacement Card was dispatched within a week and my graphic returned to their previous DX11 glory.

ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores – Limited Edition

Model : Model ZT-50313-10M
Interface : Interface PCI Express 2.0 x16 (Compatible with 1.1)
Chipset : Chipset Manufacturer NVIDIA®

GPU GeForce® GTX 560 Ti
Core clock 765 MHz
Stream Processors 448
Shader Clock 1530 MHz
Memory : Memory Clock 3800 MHz
Memory Size 1280 MB
Memory Interface 320-bit
Memory Type GDDR5
DirectX :  DirectX 11
OpenGL :  OpenGL 4.2
Ports : DVI 2 (DVI-I) / HDMI 1/ DisplayPort 1
RAMDAC : 400 MHz
Max Resolution : 2560 x 1600