Fix Spiral Knights SEGA!

     I've been playing Spiral Knight since it came out on Steam basically, and the game has substantially changed since that time, but not really for the better.  I'll go over what is right about the game first, since the game was pretty well off in it's mission-less state.  The mist vs. crystal energy concept is pretty solid, and the using mist to descend is not an issue.  There are danger rooms down there worth a bit more of your mist (and usually scare off most non-hardcore players) and you get a bit more heat and crown if you succeed but it could be a nicer pat on the back there.  The need to use your energy to craft is a good idea, and finding the blueprints to good items every mid-floor was the way it used to work.

     This gameplay style kept going on for a while and started a market going... Then there were missions, and this not only changed how the game worked but ruined the economy.  Before you were able to go down ANY shaft and see people... real people playing the game, strangers / friends / acquaintance, everyone just jumped into any game.  People used to look at what elevators were going to change when... because it mattered, and getting items was more difficult so there was a market for middle-man trading stuff.  Missions also brought in the Hall-of-Hero's which basically destroyed the market-place.  Giving this kind of access to every normal item, the players are no longer able to craft items and sell them on the market.  I mean it's bad enough people are able to buy the items outright with energy, but then offer them the recipe to everything as well?  This has got to stop, it's not helping anyone... I used to like to play the game and buy all the recipes I'd ever find to have them all, you have no idea how upset I was to see them so easy to get now, since I've spent good money on getting all of them, all for nothing; following a slap in the face after getting recipes from missions that people no longer have to pay for and having blueprints i nor anyone else can ever use.  That's how I'm re-payed for buying into that economy?

     The biggest and ugliest problem in the game thus far is how the missions give access to end-game scenarios.  This is a huge mistake for both the community and friends who play this game.  It was really, really fun going down the mines to HAVE to find different floors and see new stuff now and then as part of the game, but now the game has degraded to people whining about missions not being done, and not wanting to join your game because you're not ready for the Vanaduke missions to save on mist.  That's pure BS, People use to want to join their friends because maybe they'd get lucky with an arena or help with a boss, now people are just camping the mission over and over, and the Arcade is a long lost memory of the good ol'days in the game.

     So how to fix this mess? First get rid of the hall of bad economy and force players to find what they want after many floors of searching, or buy it from the AH from a person trying to make money... Second instead of starting the game on some missions screen that makes it seem like the missions are the heart and soul of the game (which is ugly), give the arcade life again, but making the missions only possible only once... this way people will have to do the missions at least once, but can help another do that particular version.  Although the access may be convenient it's really sad to see in the game and in practice, when all I want to do is descend a couple of floors, and all my friends(and everyone else in-game/endgame) want to do is grind bosses and make some money.  Third it would be very fitting for Spiral Knight to have passive or even active skill traits, this way they can spec a certain knight to lets say be a bomber or a swordsman and focus on a certain tactic or weapon, giving incentive to use the other characters in the game, rather than just having one knight and playing him exclusively.

     There are surely other ways to make Spiral Knights a better game, but these are just some of the improvements that I've discussed with many of my friends and game group, I hope there are more out there to help SK get back to the fun game social game it used to be...

Path of Exile - POE

Path of Exile

Beta Builds

     Path of Exile is pretty fun, a little quirky around the edges but it's not too bad, here is a video of something graphically wrong that happened, this is the only time I've ever seen something like this, but interesting to see:

     However I've already spent hours with my friends testing out certain ideas and comparing our ideas for our skill trees...  We all seem to have a different idea of how to play every class, which is really fun and diverse, even when we're playing the same 'class'.  Here are a few builds I've made, in order of character creation:

Dual Wield Duelist: Dual Duelist

Dark Templar (Necromancer Templar):  Dark Templar

Elemental Witch: TriSpell Witch

Bow Ranger (DPS): Ranged Ranger

Blunt Marauder: (No Crits/No Mana): Blood Marauder

Martyr Templar (MLG): Suicide Class

     I base many of my builds around the workings of other near by class's tree structures, taking a few bits from the trees starting at another classes base.  Hopefully if there is a passive tree change these will still work in the future to compare, but I'm having fun with the Dark Templar build the most atm, because the combination of being able to cast/fight/summon is very handy.  Except when playing with friends, the minions you get start to throw everyone off!  Here is the Dark Templar in Action!

     Needless to say, this game is pretty fun.  The style of the game including the dead babies on the beach and the enemy taking swords out from themselves to fight you keeps me intrigued.

Now to test that Martyr Templar...

Site Update!

I've finally updated my http://www.MemoryThief.Com site.  It's been a while since I've touched this Domain, but it's got a face-lift and is getting better as I integrate the sub-domains!

Dungeon Crawler Battles

     So the long awaited Diablo III is out, and it feel like Blizzard has somehow failed one of their prized IPs with content 'their grandmothers could play'.  They allowed a free beta weekend where everyone was able to try it for themselves and see the 10 year awaited title.  While playing it, the game felt a little too easy and a few things you've come to expect from the old Diablos are just missing, like choosing stats and the feeling of being able to wonder aimlessly.  But the saddest part is surely the leveling system and their skill trees...

     You can try it out for yourself, at http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian and see basically everything you're expected to play around with in the game, which isn't really much for the assumed AAA title.  The game itself is decent graphically, and the voice-overs are probably the highest quality content in the game.  I did like the level designer, and the dungeons were nicely rendered and had many interactive qualitys to them which made me go around and destroy everything!  The interface was nice and clean, but the game didn't have too many many variations on gameplay for the classes.  Today Blizzard announced it's free 90 day (with many conditions like you must have played WoW) in hopes to get more people on board their flagship.  It's interesting how Blizzard is somehow expecting their old fans to have incredibly low standards with a game that built the standards for the genre, however I hope its due to the creators dropping certain features for other ones, and the story should be prime.  It's a shame really, they've had soo long to work on it and their demo likely doesn't represent the final game very well(I hope because if it does... >_>)...

     However we're in luck, there is another Dungeon Crawler that isn't cherry coated, and is actually 'scary' as my friends compare it.  Apparently this game has been around for a bit in Alpha (about a year or so) and has finally hit Beta.  The game is Path of Exile, and it looks very nice... It might not have a zoom feature like Diablo III, but the actual game system and the passive skill tree is insane!  How insane?

     You are able to also check this one out for yourself, and try it real time: http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/ And unlike many other games, this tree allows for the same class to have totally different uses and gameplay styles, making for actual intense replay-ability.  Not to mention the art style and feel of the game is much darker and gnarly looking.  The game company itself is a small one, and it's amazing what they have created considering Diablo III is their competition.  However this doesn't stop there, Path of Exile is set to be a Free 2 Play game, and their business models doesn't really support a pay to win aspect, making it more like TF2 where you are able to buy cosmetic items or items abundantly available in the game as it is.

     I hope the Diablo team realizes their flaws and accepts their fanbase's wants in order to produce the type of game 10 years in the making should look and feel like, or perhaps they want to go the way of Duke Nukem Forever and just add Half-Life's strict one path to take style to the dungeon crawler genre.  What happened to making a game that follows how the previous games worked?

The trend of Video Game Music

     Music is an important part of the experience in any video game.  It serves not only to portray the feeling of the game and actions, but all old-school games which were inferior in hardware had to make use of some sort of melody to make any memorable tune at all, there were no audio renderings or sampled sound effects back then.  Simple pitches and usually four banks; where you would get lucky to have extensive noise functions much less reverb.


     Many of the older genre of Video games have very memorable music because they had nothing but pitches to work with, many of them have very complex melodies.  I feel this is somewhat lost in today's modern video game music trying to recreate the style and sound of a production movie soundtrack.  Sometimes I feel cheated with all the orchestration going on, and that feel the loss of nostalgia you come to expect from a video game's 'chip tunes', and the wide variety of styles you may find in one game.


     Not to say modern music hasn't made it's impact in video games, such as Halo's OST and Shadow of the Colossus' arrangements.  However it's rare to get the quality of immersion in modern games such as Osmos, where the soundtrack is strangely what is should be, or Perfect Dark 64 where all the music was well timed and situational.  Everyone knows Pac-Man's Theme!

Kerbal Space Crash!

     Who isn't into space games?  I know a lot of people think it's Rocket Science, but that's only half the fun.  It's mostly physics and mastering our ability to defeat gravity, which is basically the objective of this game.  Kerbal Space Program is a pretty unique game, the goal is to, get as far as you can... which seems easy going one way, but the real challenge there is to get back.  Frankly, leaving earth is it's own challenge but once you can get past that, you can experiment with getting to the moon, perhaps farther, or just in orbit, and staying there.  The interesting part is you can build your own rocket, in about any design you can think of, and then program the rocket to go of in stages to time your ascent into the heavens.

     The game is on a pre-order/donate basis, but there is a demo out you can get your hands on and try this out for yourself.  The demo is more than a demo, it's basically the full working game, but an early stage of development build, so it lacks the nicest features that the game has updated.  Which isn't too bad, but the game is worth the donation.  You'll be surprised how fun building rockets and trying to save your little guys from their unknowing doom.



Here is my 7th try at a rocket, of the production line 'Jupiter' which was pretty successful.  I had other lines and more rockets but this one worked well with the parts I used with an even earlier release.  One thing is for sure about this game, Jeb is loving it!

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

Hawken Closed Beta

     On the way back from GDC, met someone on an plane who was working with this game...


     I remember looking at this game a year or so ago, and thinking finally a good mech game, and it was just icing on the cake when I heard that you could get closed beta access...







So... how do you get in this closed beta?  Click on the referral link below!



Hawken (Mech game) closed Beta Link