Honestly, most of them represented hours of repetitive, mind-numbing game-play for me.

SWTOR, however, has been different. In fact, World of Warcraft could learn a few things from it.

For one, your character can speak. There are moments of dialogue in which your character participates and actively speaks. He or she has a voice of their own and what they say depends on what action you choose to make.

Yes, you can choose what path you take. Most dialogues include three options for a response. Most seem to be conversational, but occasionally some give you Force points, for the Light side or the Dark side, depending. Choose your path wisely! And your choices have rewards or ramifications down the road, affecting how things work for your character. You can make friends, allies and even enemies in this galaxy. If you chose a Dark side character to play, your character eventually changes in appearance depending on how badly they are tainted by the Dark side of the Force. How cool is that??

Also, Dungeons in Warcraft are spaces. They are parts in the story, yes, but they are represented by spaces. You go to the Dead Mines and confront Van Cleef’s daughter. In SWTOR, it’s not so much a place as it is an event. They call this a Flashpoint. The first Flashpoint gets you off your starting planet and onto the next. For my Smuggler, the ship she was on got boarded and the bridge was sealed off by the bad guys. We had to fight our way to the Engineering wing, help the Engineers, then fight our way back to the bridge. We had to reclaim the bridge, saving the crew and the Ambassador. From there, we had to fly over in a small craft to the enemy ship, then sabotage it so we could get out of its blaster range and fly back. It was simply awesome. There’s also nothing saying you have to finish a Flashpoint right then and there. Go back to it when you want and play it as much as you want (or so I’m told).

At a certain level (it varies for each class), you gain a companion NPC who will fight for you! It’s like playing a Hunter in Warcraft, but all the time. Being a soloist-type of player, I have to tell you that it’s so much fun being able to pull off a [Heroic 2] area/quest with just my companion (though it’s tough sometimes).

Someone suggested to me that Warcraft was ahead of the game because of all the pop culture it includes. While SWTOR isn’t really a good forum for that, perhaps, there was one really great little ‘shout out’ to the true Star Wars fans that I spotted in a cantina: I found a Wookie playing a board game with a droid, the droid’s arms unattached and sitting next to it on the table. Every now and then, the Wookie would jump up, clap and do a little cheer. I just wanted my character to say to the droid, “I suggest a new strategy: let the Wookie win.”

And finally, each quest is a cut-scene little cinematic which involves your character. Some people find this tedious. Personally, I love it. I feel so immersed in the story. It’s like watching a movie rather than playing a game; or, rather, it’s like being in the movie. And I love it.

What do you think of SWTOR if you’ve been playing it? What do you love? What do you hate? What do you think could use some work? I want to hear it!

]]> http://zombiegeekgirl.com/?feed=rss2&p=164 0 http://zombiegeekgirl.com/?p=150 http://zombiegeekgirl.com/?p=150#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 18:04:30 +0000 admin http://zombiegeekgirl.com/?p=150 After reading an article on Lifehacker about services people pay for online, I was feeling inspired to write about some of my favourite sites, apps, etc. Some I pay for. Some I don’t. This might become a regular column so that I don’t overwhelm a single blog post about everything and anything I think is “too cool!” to live without. So bear with me if the first few seem a little random and disjointed until I can at least get into a semi-regular rhythm of posting again.

With that said, here are a few of my favourite web-based things, and I suppose the first two you’re probably going to say, “Yeah, yeah… twitter and Facebook. Can we talk about something else?” I apologize in advance.

• twitter – I can’t help it. There is something so incredibly fun about firing off a quick status to folks I know whether I’m at a computer, my iPad or my iPhone. I also love that when I look at my friends/acquaintances’ statuses, that it’s a miss-mash of randomness that often leaves me smirking or giggling to myself. It’s fun to follow a select few celebrities, folks in the same profession (or similar) as me and folks I actually hang out with or at least have a friendship with iRL (in Real Life). Sometimes, there just isn’t time for a full blog post, you know?
• Facebook – Yep, I went there. Okay, I have a confession to make regarding this one: I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I hate some of the things that have been done to the site, how things are handled, and some of the totally unnecessary drama I see there. I have been tempted to close my account at least four or five times in the last year. But still I stay on. Why? Because Facebook reunited me with a long-time childhood friend who was like an older brother to me — and the rest of his family, of course! I have been reconnected with a few folks who otherwise might not have crossed paths with me ever again or with any kind of ease. For that reason, I stay, and keep fighting to lock down the security as much as I can despite FB’s attempts to make our info publicly available.
• World of Warcraft Community Fan Art – I have such respect for the amazingly talented fans of WoW who have submitted their artwork to this website. There are some truly incredible pieces of work up there and now I follow the Facebook page so that I get updates about new art being added to the site. It’s incredible and although I have a devArt gallery of my own, I am completely envious of such incredible talent!
• Steam – I would have given up on video games a few years ago if it wasn’t for Steam. Why? After so many critical hard drive failures, power surges, infinite blue screens of death and a myriad of other PC-killing mayhem over the last few years, it’s nice to have a way of easily restoring not just my games but also my progress, achievements, saved games, etc. Steam has a feature to back up your games, which is amazing — run it once in a blue moon (or after every major purchase) and the next #windowsfail won’t be quite as catastrophic in regards to recovering your games. Just be sure to save that backup on some kind of external media. I found out this weekend that when you restore from that backup, not only does it restore your progress, but also whatever genre tags you’ve given the games (reorganizing them for you how you had them) and then proceeds to automatically download your games for you. Considering I have about 120+ games on Steam, this has been a real life-saver.

Although not “new” in that I’ve had their links on the sidebar for a while, I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome batzy and Deadly Nightshade Botanical Society as new sponsors to the Zombie Geek Girl site.

When it comes to custom vector portraits, batzy at Etsy does some really nice work (and did my avatar for this site and 3Girls.ca). She’s pleasant to deal with, a really super-fast artist who does some real quality work.

As for Deadly Nightshade Botanical Society, they’re an awesome Steampunk band created and fronted by my two good friends Robert and Dizzy. I love Dizzy’s delicate, sometimes lilting vocals. Robert’s songwriting has always been a real treat for me. I love that there is both a mixture of harmony and dissonance, giving the over-all sound a real ‘other world’ quality that I think embodies ‘Steampunk’.

Check out their links in the navigation area!

(Yes, I updated the image as of Feb 13/11. It originally was about 100k when I first posted.)

If you’re on the internet as much as I am, you’ve likely heard about the idea that’s been bantered around about allowing usage-based billing up here in Canada-land. According to the Anti-UBB website, ISPs are looking at setting bandwidth caps at something incredibly low. So low that I’m seeing that a suggested cap is 25GB, though I’m unsure if that’s per day or per month, but the truth of the matter is that many high-end users can easily get that in a day (or less).

I haven’t recently looked at my usage in detail but considering I buy almost all my video games exclusively online (and some of them are easily half of that cap in size alone) combined with how much time I generally spend online, I’m really concerned. I buy all my music online, as well. I do a lot of browsing. MMO games are also a huge part of my online habits, which would greatly add to my own bandwidth usage. I write for 2-3 blogs at any given time and am wrapped up in many different social media sites (twitter, facebook, tumblr, etc.). Most of my hobbies, which involves a large part of my socializing, is done online. And I keep on top of developments at work via email from home, even after hours.

Will I have to sacrifice all of these facets of my life because a company that pretty much has a monopoly up here says that I have to pay through the nose to keep up with my habits and lifestyle? I already pay about $60/month for internet usage. Verizon in the US charges $19.99/month. Comcast in the States offers $69.99/mo for internet and tv or $19.99/mo for just high speed internet.

And I’m possibly looking at being charged more than $60? What’s wrong with this picture?

This is nothing but bad news, folks, and it has me raging mad.

Trust me, you do not want to see this redhead mad. An American friend of mine once likened me (when angry) to a wounded badger in a conversation with a colleague of his about whether or not Canadians were ‘too passive/polite to get angry’. While the image still makes me giggle, the point is the same. I’m angry. We should all be angry. We already get gouged compared to other countries because a small handful of companies have a cozy little monopoly up here. This is going to push us back by decades.

Please, fellow Canadians, be sure to sign the petition with the Stop The Meter campaign and get this madness to stop before it starts. The internet should not be just for people who have money to throw away! Prevent the gouging now!

I get that they might believe that this means we’ll all go watch more tv, but frankly, if left to my own devices, I’ll just curl up with some good books and cancel my tv service so I can afford to send emails and blog here every now and then, thankyouverymuch.

/soap box

I don’t have a game-related post today, sorry. It’s more about movies. In rearranging our DVD and VHS collection (yes, we still have VHS), I was reminded of some really great movies (and not so great movies) that I enjoyed in the past. Some of these, I’ll have to get on DVD and see about getting rid of their old, magnetic tape counterparts. Today has been all about older movies, I think. Earlier, hubby and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on tv.

Well, it must be a Matthew Broderick day on tv because now, we’re watching War Games, also with Broderick. I said a few moments ago that the only thing that would make this day more perfect would be if they played Ladyhawke! Okay, Ladyhawke was pure cheese, but it was fun. So were movies such as Tank Girl and the original I Come In Peace. Let’s not forget Big Trouble In Little China, Escape from New York, and even They Live!.

I could go on about other cheesy movies from over a decade or more ago, but I’d love to hear about what some of your favourites are/were!

With that said, I’d like to welcome my first two ‘sponsor’ sites: 3 Girls 2 Cents 1 Blog and Clockwork Heresy!

3 Girls 2 Cents 1 Blog is a fun little review site which reviews just about anything and everything, so long as the writer(s) have personally experienced it. Topics thus far have covered frozen dessert (not ice cream), the national women’s show, running shoes, grocery delivery service and even a local tea house. It’s run by three women (including my good friend Krystyne) with occasional guest writers and I have even written a couple of reviews for them (and hope to do some more soon). Pop by and tell them I sent you!

That leaves Clockwork Heresy, a webcomic which appears to be just starting out, written and illustrated by a friend of mine, A. Conti. We’ve known each other online for about ten years now, having met in the online text-based roleplaying community (MUSHing). I’ve watched him develop his dark, anime-inspired style over the years and am excited that he’s decided to put his mad skillz to good use and share the results with the world. It appears that he’s only gotten a handful of illustrations up, but I know he’s got more in the wings. Make sure to check the site from time to time to see if there’s anything new!

Even when we moved to the keyboard and disk drive version of the Atari (the Atari 800), I would still play games with my friend next door on her Coleco machine. In high school, a friend of mine had a Nintendo. In university, another friend would bring out his Playstation. And my husband and I even bought a Playstation and then upgraded to a Playstation 2.

So, my exposure to console gaming wasn’t exactly sparse, but I just always felt myself more comfortable with the (what I considered more precise) PC controls. While friends were thumbing their way through FPS styled games, I branched off and point and clicked my way through RPG after RPG on the computer. And I’ve always maintained that I am strictly a PC gamer and despite owning my own PS3, that I would never fully switch.

But since I started working in a media centre with its own video games collection and taken it upon myself to try to become more familiar with our collection, I don’t know that I can honestly make that claim anymore. While I can’t say the Wii would be my preferred poison as the controls are just too completely alien to me, the X-Box has been slowly luring me over to its side. And the game that had a hand in this change in attitude is Assassin’s Creed.

Sure, I know I’m “behind the times” and that Assassin’s Creed has been out on the market for quite a while (as the third installment of the title is now out) but with the exception of World of Warcraft expansions, I rarely buy any game the moment it hits the shelves. I’m not a person who feels the need to jump on the bandwagon with most games right away; I prefer to wait a while, see how others are enjoying it, hear what the game is all about, then make a decision as to whether or not I feel this is something worth looking into.

I already had Assassin’s Creed on the PC and while I really loved the graphics and was slowly learning the ropes, I was finding the keyboard and mouse controls to be a little unwieldy. But I was trying to get used to it and trying to re-map my key bindings every now and then to see if I could make things a little less awkward. The other issue I have is that I’m an old-school keyboard game player in that I don’t even use the WASD keys for maneuvering about in a game; I still use the arrow keys. Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, fuzzball. What can I say? I am a creature of habit.

So I decided to try Assassin’s Creed on the X-Box. Wow. What a difference! While I don’t really have the thumb-dexterity that other, more seasoned console gamers have to really make gameplay run smoothly, it really is a better experience running the game via the X-Box. Controlling my character’s trajectory is a bit difficult and he tends to run around a lot in ways that make him look like a spastic version of the Tasmanian Devil (and he’s pretty spastic to begin with), but the other actions he needs to do were so much easier to control with the X-Box controller than the PC keyboard. The game itself isn’t any easier, mind you, but I have really enjoyed how much more control I have over the same character on the console rather than the computer.

Is it just that some games aren’t really meant for the PC and end up losing something in the translation or is there just more control over games which require more coordinated moves when playing it on the console? I don’t know that I’m qualified to answer that question. Regardless, I find myself branching out into console gaming more and more. Will my PC gaming go the way of the do-do? I don’t think so. As long as there are still PC games available, I will likely keep playing them. Again, I am a creature of habit, and I do enjoy the over-all experience. I see the addition of console gaming more like expanding my gaming horizons.

Now, I just need to exercise my thumbs for a little more dexterity and I’ll be good.

Missing the whole experience of playing a real card game, I decided to try out Poker Night at the Inventory. I pre-ordered it through Steam a month and a half ago (or longer) and patiently (or not so patiently) waited for its release date. Despite the long wait, I have not been disappointed.

The whole premise involves going to this kind of seedy, kind of hidden-away warehouse-like establishment where card games and other less socially approved-of activities can be indulged upon. I had the sound turned off by accident while the intro played, so I missed the actual storyline, but the whole thing has a very big Prohibition-feel to it.

Anyway, the would-be facilitator of the event led me to the back of the room where an auditorium-type of stage could be seen, and a lone poker table had been set up. This is where my character was told to park it and before I knew it, I was engaged in one of the more interesting poker games I’ve ever played.

Around the table, my would-be opponents were: Max (the insane, psycho-bunny from Sam & Max), Strongbad (of Homestar Runne fame), the Heavy (from Team Fortress) and Tycho (a la Penny Arcade). The cool thing is that the game developers kept each of the characters true to their original art style, so Tycho looks like a hand-drawn comic book character while Max looks like a 3D, computer-created character. They would each tell brief stories of their mad skillz at poker, complain about bad hands and insult me for being cowardly and folding all in their own fashion. They interacted with each other, as well, marveling at their own bad luck, taunting each other for ‘sucking’ at the game and so on.

This was more than just a poker video game on the screen; it was an experience! While computer sprites will never take the place of real human beings (in my mind, anyway), this rag-tag band of rather familiar characters kept me amused throughout my gameplay. I found myself hitting the ‘skip to next hand’ button less and less after folding, because I didn’t want to miss what these characters had to say to me and the others around them.

All told, for the $4.99 I paid on Steam for the game, I have to say I’m mighty impressed with the game and over all experience playing it. Well worth the fiver spent on it!

It’s sad that my original character (a Night Elf warrior named Lathela) is not yet level 85, but my next favourite character (a Draenei ice mage named Ozera) hit level 85 sometime last week. I’m rather excited about this and have been struck with quite the sense of accomplishment. Not only do I have my first level 85 character, but I’ve managed to get the following quest achievements:

• Coming Down the Mountain (115 quests in Hyjal)
• Beware the ‘Unbeatable?’ Pterodactyl (all the jousting quests in Hyjal up to and including the Egg Wave)
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (complete all the Neptulon quests in Vashj’ir up to and including Defending the Rift)
• Sinking into Vashj’ir (160 quests in Vashj’ir)
• Visions of Vashj’ir Past (witness 3 Naz’jar Battlemaiden visions)
• Unearthing Uldum (108 quests in Uldum)
• In a Thousand Years Even You Might Be Worth Something (complete the whole Harrison Jones quest line)
• Help the Bombadier! I’m the Bombadier! (kill 10 Schnotzz Infantry with one bomb)
• Deep in the Deepholm (125 quests in Deepholm)

And the only exploration quests I need from Cataclysm are the Explore Tol Barad one, then the one where you kill a Whale Shark in Vashj’ir and the other one where you get killed by Deathwing. Oh, and I need to finish the quests in the Twilight Highlands.

All told, I’ve found the experience pretty fun. I love playing in the new areas and being level 85 makes catching up on the quests that I’m missing a lot easier, as well as getting my professions up to level.

There are plenty of reviews out there about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, I know; I just have to share my own thoughts on the subject regardless. I’ve been playing Warcraft for about four or five years now and have enjoyed it, for the most part. Some of the new content from the Lich King expansion pack was pretty darned cool to me. I loved the new “phased” storyline-style content that came with the Death Knights and some of the areas, such as the northern parts of Dragonblight. So when Cataclysm came out and continued with the phased story-based quest lines, I was happier than a cat in a sunbeam.

Not only has Blizzard included this phasing in the old world and the new areas of the old world (such as Gilneas, the Worgen’s starting zone), but they’ve also added new features, such as being able to ride flying mounts through the old world (no more will my level 80+ characters ride at 100% speed along with the level 20s; they can soar at up to 310% speed on their drakes and celestial steeds).  Quests are grouped better so you’re not running all over the map again and again just to run a bag of apples between NPCs all the time. Additional flight paths have been added to the old map, making it faster to get around before you can buy a mount. And, as with the last two expansions, new races and class combinations were made available.

Trying out the Goblin area was fun and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed the quests and new zone, finding it difficult to take it too seriously. With crazy cars that run on roads that look more like a kid’s Hotwheels track and quests entitled, “Get to the Gyrocoptah!”, it really is hard not to have fun in that zone! I still haven’t finished the second staging area yet, but I look forward to working on it again soon — after I finish getting my second level 85 character.  And of course, being able to play a werewolf (Worgen) is a huge plus for me. The fact that these characters get top hats by level 10 or so and speak like Brits makes me insanely happy.

The new areas for level 80+ characters are pretty fun. The underwater area, Vashj’ir, is fascinating and at the end of one of the main quest lines, you get a seahorse to move around the zone faster. If only it would work in other areas of the map! Finally getting to go into Hyjal was exciting, as well, and challenging — enough that I had to abandon it and go back to it after I had finished with Vashj’ir and Deepholm (where Deathwing sprung from). But by far, I thoroughly enjoyed going to Uldum. I loved how it reminded me of a cross between ancient Egypt and something like Star Gate without the spaceships, but by far, the most fun I had was doing the Indiana Jones-inspired quest line where you help an NPC named Harrison Jones (you even get to see him have a fist fight with the enemy in front of a plane propeller!).

All told, I have enjoyed the new content for Cataclysm, the new races, new class possibilities and the new gaming paradigm Blizzard presents to us. I know some people feel it hand-holds players too much, but for the casual player, it all really comes together and makes World of Warcraft a much more approachable, accessible game.