Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

MMO Review – Mythos (EU) Beta

So this past weekend I downloaded Mythos for the end of their closed beta. Open beta starts tomorrow April 12th. Mythos is a cross between Torchlight, Hellgate London, and Diablo. Its cartoonish like Torchlight, though not as much. You grab quests in each city and they have it divided into many many towns which are linked by swirly gates. Each town has 1 or more exits to other towns and contains a swirly instance gate which contain entrances to 8-12 dungeon zones. Each dungeon is 1 to 4 levels.

The residents of the towns give you quests and will send you into one of those dungeons to collect items or kill a boss. When you are done, you then have to exit and return to the NPC quest giver. The MMO Vindictus is the other extreme where you return to the same town for your first 44+ levels and enter instances from 5 different locations. But in Mythos each zone only lasts for 3 or 4 levels. This creates lots of useless running. They could really condense this quite a bit and make the players happier.
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MMO Review Follow-Up – Rift (After Launch)

My last thoughts on Rift were back after Beta 4. I continued to play in beta 5, 6, and 7 and now have been playing the headstart and release versions. I must say that Rift has been to smoothest release ever for a game as far as few bugs, no lag, no servers failing or dropping. One thing that ruined the perfect score was the lack of enough starter servers. They did add more as needed, but it was too late for all the guilds that set the server they were going to be playing on the day before. This caused massive queues making people wait hours just to get in. There still are queues during prime time, but not nearly as bad.
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MMO Review – Rift (beta)

I was invited to the Rift Beta 4 event this past weekend and as a result I have pre-ordered.

If you play WoW, you will feel very comfortable playing Rift. Things are basically where you are use to finding them. Settings are similar, color of weapon grades, hotbar, and talent trees. If you could change something in WoW, you can do it in Rift. But then it goes another step beyond. All those addons you dowload to make things work better and let you customize your ui…they are already in the game. Brand new UIs that you need to get use to are one thing that make it hard for people to switch games. Coming from WoW, I feel right at home. (more…)

Kinect and XBox 360 – RROD

Sooo, For Christmas, I bought an XBox360 Kinect thingie along with Dance Central and the Fitness One. It arrives and I wrap it up as a gift to give my son. Christmas comes and he opens all the gifts and is excited to try it out. Later that evening we get a chance to try it.

I plugged it in, connected everything and turned on the unit. I didn’t expect it to do anything yet, and I wasn’t disappointed. I knew it had to download an update since it didn’t come with software. It didn’t seem to want to update on its own, so I put in one of the Kinect Games and sure enough, it informed me I needed to update. I hit yes and let it do its thing. After 3 or 4 or 5 cycles through its update process it rebooted 1 or 2 times and then it started its setup and adjustments…asking me to do certain things. At one point it asked me to confirm or cancel and I couldn’t get the Kinect to do either and then it froze.
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MMO Review – Vindictus

So my son and I were looking for something new to play and we decided to go the free route. I saw him playing some ugly browser based game and said we should try a new one out. I heard of a newer game Vindictus from Massively and decided to give it a try. These are my feelings so far after reaching level 21.

After a 3-5 hour download we were up and running. The graphics are pretty good and aim at realism. Characters movement is believable and smooth. It is an action MMO where you feel powerful but you do get hurt and die now and then. There are 3 classes: A warrior type (Fiona), a dual sword swinger (Lann) and a mage type (Evie) 2 more coming soon.
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