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Who Cares About The Vita?

Monday, February 13th, 2012

It’s my birthday soon, a big one at that. Rumour is “it’s going to be massive”! KLS seems to be having difficulty coming up with gifts, and yesterday asked me if I wanted a Vita.

This is the new Sony handheld, which comes out next week. It’s been failing in a big way in Japan, and shockingly undermarketed (so far) in the US. So I did some investigation into the system and – more importantly – the launch games.

The answer was an overwhelming “No”! No, I don’t want this overpriced system with no good games with the only interesting aspect being one of this games is called ‘Army Corps Of Hell’. Given the reaction in Japan, and the price and lackluster launch games here in the US, I think the future for this system looks grim indeed.

Soooo… I wonder what I will get for my birthday 🙂

Posted in Games, Otaku, Tech | Comments Closed

Sea Pony

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

A few months ago I joked to SFL that the Sea Pony was the main reason I wanted to return to WoW. It’s a new pet, rarely fished up at a particular spot in the game.

It probably took me about 2 hours to fish the little bugger up 🙂

Posted in Games, Pets, Tech | 1 Comment »

The Year Apple Broke Games

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Time once again for the much-beloved annual summary of my game-buying habits (now in it’s fifth year!).

During 2011 I added a total of 129 games to my collection, although my choice of words here is arguable, since a whopping 59% of these games were iOS downloads. That’s right – this past year represented by far the smallest amount of retail game purchases I have made in 18 years of keeping figures.

Here are the charts. Let’s start with total games acquired:

That’s 67 iOS games, at an average price of just over $2 apiece. Note I did not include free games in this list (since many of those are quickly deleted never to be looked at again). Note the sliver for the Wii – only 2 games in fact. 2011 is probably the year in which the Wii has died for this player. Note also an unusually high amount of PSP games (18 actually). This is because the system has effectively died, and it was time to ‘fire sale’ a lot of games I had kept my eye on for a while.

This next chart shows the percentage breakdown in terms of dollars spent:

As expected, iOS is a much smaller portion of the pie here. That’s what happens when the margin price is set so low. It’s interesting to note that overall, a far greater percentage of my game-buying (and playing, obviously) has been on portable games (iPad, DS, PSP, 3DS). This is not that unusual – I’ve always been a big fan of portable systems – but it was helped last year by the fact I spent large portions of the year working on my dissertation and simply didn’t have the time to sit down and devote myself to a console game. Which would have been PS3 only, given how the Wii died and I don’t have an XBox 360.

In total, I spent $1545 on games last year, a slight increase from 2010 but still well below the high-$2000’s from a decade ago. Do I play less games? No I don’t (the total number of purchases is higher than a decade ago), I just play cheaper ones 🙂

The best game of the year? Well I’ll have to give two awards here – one for iOS and one for retail. The best iOS award would go to…

The above game owned my life for a few weeks in the same way it’s predecessor Llamatron did back in 1991. Jeff Minter has iOS by the horns right now (geddit!) and I’m a happy man about that 🙂

As for non-download games, this guy here gets my nod:

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for PSP. Yes, another re-release. I still own the (now very expensive and collectable) PS1 version and played it to death, so I had wondered if there was much interest for me in the PSP update. Well yes Robert, there was. As in 200 hours of it! A must-buy if you like tactics games and have a PSP. (This game also inspired one this years more unusual blog posts)

Note that I did get an (as yet unplayed) new Monster Hunter game for Christmas (portable 3rd), so the broken streak of games-of-the-year will probably return in 2012 🙂

Posted in Blog, Games, Otaku, Tech | 1 Comment »

The Warcraft Post

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

It had been about 2.5 years since I last played World of Warcraft and a lot had happened in the game during that time. Specifically, an expansion (Cataclysm) and four major content patches. I had missed a lot!

For about two years of that time my interest in the game was dulled, but during last semester I began to have pinings, and since I received Cataclysm for Christmas I eagerly reinstalled and resubscribed to the game upon arriving back from Australia and am now back on the wagon.

That’s the first of the two possible starting zones that I explored – an underwater zone called Vashj’ir. The screenshot is taken on my new iMac, which I bought when I started playing since the game ran poorly on my old one (they updated the system requirements for the Mac client to no longer fully support pre-Lion OS). The underwater zone was a lot of fun, but I think a poor showcase for Cataclysm as a whole. Compared to the other new zones, it is graphically the worst by far. Check out these shots of Uldum, a lvl 85 zone:

Or another high level zone, The Twilight Highlands:

Or the elemental earth plane, Deepholm:

Beautiful aren’t they? Since I’ve always loved Warcraft’s graphics, and exploring, a lot of my thrill of playing again is to see all the new zones and the amazing Blizzard art direction.

It took me about 5 days to get to level 85 (the new cap), playing a bit like a madman. By then I had only explored 2.5 of the 5 new questing zones, so I suspect since I am coming in on the tail end of an expansion the leveling curve has been reduced somewhat.

Blizzard has also added a great deal of mechanisms to speed up the gear aquisition process and make the game less of a grind. As such, I was able – the day after hitting 85 – to enter the new end-game raid ‘The Madness of Deathwing’ and even take down the final boss. Such things would have been inconceivable in the WoW of old:

I was still very poorly equipped – notice my apalling DPS in the above shot 🙂

Level 85 is magnitudes more powerful than level 80. I was able to easily solo the entire Molten Core (an old level 60 raid) and even fight this guy with a tiny raid containing only 3 or 4 meaningful dps-ers:

I’m enjoying the game a lot though. Even though I’ve beaten Deathwing (once!), there’s still much more to do and items to get. I guess I’m going to stay on the wagon for a while longer…