The next free update (Issue 17 : Dark mirror) looks set to land very soon and it’s going to arrive all guns blazing bringing with it a revamp to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles with the new “Ultra mode” graphical setting.

It won’t take you much searching to find many gamers comments/thoughts & reactions to the game to all be of a similar nature, the game looks old and out-dated. A fair comment considering that the game is about to celebrate it’s 6th anniversary and the technology it was designed for is so far from cutting-edge it’s scary.

I thought I’d look at the specifications needed to run the game if you bought it now:

• Minimum : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce 2 Series, ATI™ Radeon® 8500 or Intel® i865G Series Video Card
• Recommended : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6200

A quick peak at the latest Steam hardware survey and it’s easy to see that many people have hardware that is capable of doing alot more, so a move to improve the existing games graphics is one that can only be a benefit to all players old and new.

I’m looking forward to seeing the game through enhanced graphics and judging by the screen-shots it’s going to be very nice indeed, the development team have been busy working on the new expansion and retro-fitting the existing game. Not a small task when you think of all the textures and effects that can be found in a single zone.

Image from : http://eu.cityofheroes.com/en/news/article/ultra_mode_issue_17_and_going_rogue

Oh and remember there is a Double XP an account reactivation weekend from the 4th to the 7th of March

My excitement for Modern Warfare 2 has started to wain a little, it’s cause hasn’t been helped by the large percentage of blatant hackers in the game that can’t be reported in any shape or form.

But enough with the old and in with the new, well newish, ok, ok, once were new.
My current play list looks something like this:

• Everquest 2 (14 day trial) — frustratingly XFire isn’t recognising EQ2 so no time is being marked against it. I’m not sure I could face another standard MMO at the moment but the characters are very detailed and i’ve found the none way-pointed missions  lead to more exploration.
• Wizard 101 — Rach and I have been trying out some less resource intensive games that allow us to pick up and play when we get a spare minute. I’m finding the game is scarcely entertaining
• Spellborn — I’ve taken to playing a little Spellborn when I fancy a change of pace. The game delivers something different each time I play.
• Warhammer Online — I’m playing the free Tier one stuff but with multiple builds, mostly to get a  feel for how the classes are designed and how they work with the other player classes.
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (On the XBob) — I’ve been having some great fun with this title certainly one to try if you’re a Marvel fan.

Still to come:

• Mass Effect — Everyone is Raving about Mass Effect 2 so I’ve decide to try and get the original game completed first, the only problem is I have to re-install it since my HDD swap.
• Myst online – Hopefully I’ll get back into trying this now free title once more.
• Chaos Rising Dawn of War 2 — looking forward to this expansion when it arrives.

Throw all that into the mix with everything and I find myself struggling to get a blog post writing in a week.

But it’s all good fun

2010 the year that I mostly feel a mixture of happiness and exhaustion, I’m still adjusting to mangining my time in a new manner. Gone are those 6 hours gaming stints, I appear to just grab smaller chunks of time here and there as my gameplay charts shows and it’s easy to see what my major time sink has been recently.

I recently spotted that there is a Dawn of War II expansion (addon) called Chaos Rising due out at the beinging of March, which is rather cool as I’ve started replaying the game while reading the novel. The book is very enjoyable if you are a fan of the 40k universe and details alot of the backstory that isn’t in the game.

Well that is enough ramblings for now.

Now Playing  : VNV Nation – Standing

IWNet

I am unsure if Infinity Ward were just being lazy or they truly believed that their IWNet system was going to change the face of PC gaming. For those of you unfamiliar with how the system works it functions like a Console match making system.

I believe that from the outset their were three flaws in the plan to give PC gamers IWNet:

1. The player numbers for match making won’t be there for the PC version and players could end up waiting and having to re-check for available matches repeatedly and slowly get bored and go and play another game.
2. PC gamers will go for the servers with better pings and can generally expect all players on that server to have a similar ping (else the server will forcibly remove those high ping players), being placed in a match with player that aren’t in the same hemisphere is not good
3. PC gamers won’t play the new big thing if they perceive it to be flawed and looking at the figures on Xfire (yes it’s not the be-all and end-all of stats I know) the original Modern Warfare  is still being played by more people than the sequel.

OK so it may not seem like much but combine those with the fact that there is no functionality to add clan tags the whole thing really doesn’t seek to give the PC any benefits.

So perhaps they didn’t plan ahead and think things through but the result is a poorly functioning system when the total number of players is less than 150,000. Finding and remaining in a match is nearly impossible, sometimes you end up with various message that all stop you searching for a match and force you to retry over and over.

If you haven’t been exposed to the match making system that is IWNet you should watch at least some of this video to get an idea of the frustration that faces players  http://www.wegame.com/watch/iwnet-why-do-we-bother/

Hackers

link – There is a darker element to the way in which the IWNet system runs and that is the number of hackers in the game. One of the reasons for the gaming using Steam was to use the VAC system and combined with the IWNet system reduce the number of hackers. Sadly this doesn’t work and there appears to be no way of reporting hackers or their exploits and as soon as a fix is make they start on a new one.
Without dedicated servers with admins these players continually ruin the game for other players and against force more people to cease playing through frustration.

Result

The multi-player element of the game isn’t what I or thousands of other player expected compared to COD4, of course we are now the minority and aren’t the focus of developers like Infinity Ward. Very sad but true.

My old SATA discs were a little old and both had snapped the plastic support for the data cable off. This meant they were a little flaky at times and the one drive hadn’t work for the last 3 months.

I planned on cloning the OS and migrating the whole lot over to the new discs this would have been fine, only due too my partitions things weren’t going to be so easy.

Happily I have discovered that there are 2 great benefits to how I game.

MMOs – all my mmo games that I moved over worked off the bat, which is rather good considering their size and the potential downloading that could have been required to re-install them. (LoTRo was a game that didn’t like this last upgrade but It wasn’t installed this time around)

Steam – Horrah for Steam, well nearly. You see my steam installation wasn’t exactly the same as the one described in the Steam Knowledge base. They assumed my steamapps folder was under the main steam folder (steam\steamapps) when in fact it was located at steam\config\steamapps.
This resulted in a bit of a headache because moving the apps folder to that new location resulted in Steam not loading up. But after some trial and error I found that I needed to boot Steam up without the apps folder and it would be created, then keep the files that it generated as they held the correct path. A little awkward but worth it as downloading 43GB of game data wasn’t as appealing as you’d think.

So I’ve now got my shiny Christmas presents installed and a massive 500gb Free

My 2009 was filled with some giant life-events varying from our Wedding to the departure of loved ones. Of course the Pièce de résistance was the arrival of Benjamin Penny who snuck in with only 5 days left of the year.

So thanks to everyone that made Two thousand and nine an enjoyable year, it seems the next is shaping up to be a bumper edition too.

P.S. I hope you all had a good Christmas!

Of course there are many reasons for this, I would imagine the primary ones being Issue 14 (Architect) which wasn’t a small update by anyones standards. Now outside of bug and quality of life improvements the additional content that is delivered.

If you took all of the free updates to the game in the last 2 years alone, you soon see that the volume of content is on-par with what some other games would refer to as Expansions.

I really don’t have any problem with no free updates as long as any bug fixes are the primary focus but apparently some-people believe that free content is owned to them just for subscribing.

I appear to have digressed a little from the topic in the title, so onto Issue 16.

Issue 16 is a great update to the City of Heroes game here is a quick run down of the main areas that have been updated:

• Power Proliferation (including 1 new set)
• Power Customization (Colourisation)
• Pets will finally zone with masters
• Enhanced Difficulty Options
• Super sidekicking

Now the first 2 options appeared the most interesting to me, but then the Super sidekicking was announced and I can’t decide which feature is most exciting. I think that being able to team with anyone at any level is going to open up alot of options for players. Not longer will you have to deal with friends leveling away from you and being too far ahead to group with.

The bulk of the Issue is around the powersets but there are some smaller changes that are equally as cool, such as:

• Additional Tool tips and a re-organisation of the options panes
• Character selection at logon displays the last costume they were wearing
• Brawl no longer has an endurance cost
• A settings to only allow email from those on your friends list and those in your SG

There are notes over at paragon wiki http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Patch_Notes/2009-09-15 for easy reading and quick reference.

It’s a tweaked version of a downloadable theme by James Barclay (http://everythingisgray.com/), and I find it rather smart and easy going at the same time.

What do you think?

First was Champions Online, which is now live and appears to doing a good job so far and I believe I glanced a Tweat about a first free expansion.

The second open beta client to be removed is that of the rather pretty Fallen Earth, I didn’t really get much chance to play about on this as my Graphics card was having issues. I hope to get chance to revisit this game when I have more time on my hands.

The third open beta I have been playing is a FPS game called Section 8, I heard about the game while listening to the Gamers with jobs podcast. I have to admit that I believed I wasn’t going to enjoy this game as it looks like another hopper populated FPS, that was being developed for the console market with a PC port thrown in for good measure.

Boy was I wrong. This open beta with only a fraction of the skills and maps was completely wonderful and didn’t become repetitive for each match. The match were long enough to be fun and allowed you to get into the swing of things, but not drawn-out where you end up praying for the match to finish. The customisable load-outs and suits gave a superior feeling to the standard FPS game we tend to get sucked into these days, combine that with the ability to “Drop” anywhere on the map makes this game ideal for the quick drop in gamer.

The game will also feature a single player campaign with the multi-player remaining the backbone of the product.

During post match chatter I read the following “Win or lose, you feel like you have achieved something in this game, and it’s fun”.

Section 8 is out for the PC and XBox360 on Friday 4th September (I believe), no doubt there will be demos around. So if you are looking for a game to perhaps tide you over until Modern Warfare 2 arrives in November, perhaps you should give Section 8 a whirl.

Ok so it may not be a huge thing to everyone, but us EU gamers frequently feel left out of various game bonuses that are offered at the State-side based conventions. So a big thank you Melissa “War Witch” Bianco (who can also be found in those zones too)  for adding these.

After flying around for a little while I stumbled across the NPCs named after Rachy and I, also I spotted a couple of other names that sounded familiar.

Now I’m in a game, am I like immortal now or something?