I just realised something. I just hit 100 posts on the new version of this blog the other day. Nice.

I almost forgot the 'F' in Shift.

When someone mentioned Need for Speed, I would usually start to think about the terrible things EA did to the franchise. Like the urban tuning streetracing thing. Underground, Most Wanted, Carbon, ProStreet. Horrid. I'm not saying that I'm a race-game connoisseur, but I do know what I like.
When Race Driver: GRID came out, over a year ago, I immediately rushed out to the stores to buy it. A friend of mine persuaded me to download the demo onto my 360. I loved the raw style, the fact that it's about racing and not about nonsense. I loved that it wasn't NfS. Ofcourse, Codemasters is a bit less likely to ruin a racing game than EA, but still.

The racing madness continued when the same friend showed me Forza Motorsport 2. I was still working on GRID, so a knack for cornering and general driving was still there. Nevertheless, I found myself next to the track often, simply because of it's simulative nature, as opposed to GRID's arcade-y approach. Having met such different games, I automatically built some sort of gradient in gameplay for them. NfS far on the arcade side, Forza at the simulation side and GRID in the middle.

And this is where NfS: Shift comes in. A few weeks ago, a friend handed me the game, mainly for the gamerscore. So I jammed the disc in my console and started playing. My first reaction was "Pretty." My second reaction was "Where the ... is my car going?". For the ones that haven't played the latest incarnation; Shift is set in an alternate reality. It's a big claim, okay, but I has proof.
Usually, cars prefer the track over the gravel next to the track. Also, cars usually manage to be handled. Each car feels like you're walking a 7-ton rabid poodle with ADD and a sugar rush. One slight tap from an opponent sends your car skidding all over the track, often taking more than ten seconds to recover. That is, if you don't have to take your car out of the boarding with a spatula. In retrospect, a spatula would make a nice pre-order gift.
But that is nothing compared to another strange phenomenon. Apparently, a cheap car costing about €40.000 can be taken far into the highest tiers (you need heavy-duty leashes though) with a few adjustments, making a total of around half a million. However, a car that costs (when upgraded) about as much as the CEO of a bank gets as a bonus (let's say 1.2 million) is more likely to crash in the first corner. EA has managed to make the cost of a car directly proportional to the inability to win a race with it. An astounding feat, I have to say.

Ofcourse, the above paragraph needs to be taken with a small grain of salt. Just a tiny bit. The poodle only weighs 6 tons. The game also has it's good sides aswell. The game looks great. Just beautiful. Okay, the damage is nothing compared to the way GRID has shown it to us, but hey, it's EA. There is a fine array of cars, mostly European and the amount of shopping carts is kept to a minimum. You have proper cars and then you have shopping carts BMWs.
The tracks are great too and form a mostly complete set of circuits all over the world. It even has the 'real' Nürburgring (take that, GRID)! Still, no love for Zandvoort.
But the best part is that this actually is hope for the people that enjoyed the old NfS titles. Let's just hope that EA does continue down this path.

Oh, and the title? Atleast it got your attention.

P.S.: EA and gnomes are the bane of my existence. In other news: Water is wet. Full report at 5.
P.P.S.: Horrible Photoshop is horrible.

Football Guitar Hero

I use Google Reader... alot, and in one category, aptly named GameNews, I often get the silliest game-related things. Developers and publishers making claims that turn out to be false, tons of fan-art (often really good pieces too) and insane videos. Like this one:

Gnomes! GNOOOOOOMES!

So today I had my first session of D&D. Because I didn't want to be late, I left home extra early, as I'd be going to my local gaming store by bicycle. I ended up there about three quarters of an hour early. Great. After stuffing myself at the local Burger King (hate that place, but it was the only open store), I was still early, but only a mere 15 minutes early. After waiting for several minutes, the rest of the party arrived and so we waited together for the store to open.
Introductions were made (as I'm the new guy) and I quickly learned that this party was a bit off. Two (!) Gnome Rogues, one Elven Ranger and me, a Human Shaman. Oh, and a Goblin Fighter that thinks that he is a Gnome was missing.

Anyhow, we started playing. As the party (sans me, I wasn't in it yet) continued their adventure, one of the rogues explained to me that his character has kleptomania and as such, cannot control his urges to steal. Nice touch is that he never knows that he is stealing and is actually pretty against stealing. So we have a compulsive thief that is against thievery. Okay.
The party entered the next room and all there was was a human figure tied up on a chair. Guess who that is? No, not Santa.
Immediately the kleptomaniac started to fondle me for precious items and started asking if I had any money. I said I didn't have any and rolled a Bluff check for it. I won the check and his character still doesn't know that I have 45gp. However, he did find my totem and stole it. Ofcourse, my character didn't know this.

I joined forces with the party and soon we found ourselves in a combat encounter. Yay! We rolled for initiative and once my turn came, I wanted to kill some skeletons. But alas, all of my powers need an implement... my totem! All I could do was summon my spirit companion (a fierce lion... portrayed by a scarecrow miniature.) and whack the bag of bones in front of me with a morningstar.
Luckily the kleptomaniac died a swift death after being swarmed by the reanimated bones. After a nice (Natural 20!) Perception check, I saw that the gnome had my totem! I sent my spirit companion to fetch it, provoking an attack of opportunity. This killed it.
But I didn't need to worry, I resummoned it on the same spot where the gnome lied, told it to fetch it and used my action point to allow my lion to return to me.
With my regained powers, we quickly got rid of the skeletons.
Still, unhappy with the thievery, I took some rope and tied the totem tightly to myself, making it unable to disappear unnoticed. The DM said any thieves would get -20 on their Thievery check. Yup.

Only then I proceeded to stabilize the dying gnome. Once he had regained his hitpoints, we wanted to know what happened. Lots of talk, nothing convincing, so we kicked the gnome out of the party. Luckily the player had another character with him, a Doppleganger Cleric.
Now, Dopplegangers can change their appearance, changing them into any humanoid that they have seen... as a minor action.
Because of this and the fact that said Cleric is a spy for a lord whose name I can't even pronounce, getting him into the party took an hour.

After that, we killed some more skeletons, which nearly killed half the party. But in the last two minutes before the sore closed we finally found the key with which we can continue the story...

The story isn't a great plot; a dark figure has asked the party if they would be so kind as to fetch a magical item from a tomb. Okay, nothing suspicious whatsoever. Not that my character's motivation is that original. No, returning to your tribe after your naming ritual only to find them slain by unknown foes is a bit of a cliché, but meh.
We played on a battlemat, a large sheet of vinyl with squares on it. Just add a marker and presto! You have a dungeon. Very simple and efficient, but a bit lacklustre for my tastes.
I want to play around with Grumble Mapper more.

P.S.: Gnomes. I thought I quit WoW... Damn the little pests!

Background: Now 100% more simple.

Rawr! Updatings!

I've been playing Castle Crashers lately, after buying it in an impulse along with Frogger and it is an awesome game. At least, to me it is. Damsels in distress, plundering barbarians, fierce creatures and heroic knights... packed in silly humour and frantic gameplay. But among my friends, it is quite the hit. Even the non-gamer people that played it, liked it.
Each character you can play has it's own powers, the red knight uses lightning, the blue one ice, the orange one uses fire and so on. I played as the red knight and erm... 'acquired' me a lightsaber, which turned me into a lightsaber wielding, lightning choking templar. Awesome. After that, my friends kept calling me a Sith Lord.

So when I got to a friend's LAN-party this week, I changed my in-game name to Medieval Sith Lord. Now, our LAN-parties are hilarious, especially the first game. People change their in-game names from time to time, but I haven't for the last two years. So nobody knew who this Sith Lord was. Being the best is even funnier when anonymous. "Dammit, who's that spy that keeps stabbing me?!"

Something the LAN-parties also have is the games issue. I own a ton of games, but most of them are singleplayer masterpieces, not to be consumed by more than one. And even if I have a game we want to play, it's probably on Steam, so only I can play at a time. The result is peer pressure piracy. At the moment, I have three versions of Team Fortress 2 on my laptop; One original and two illegal ones, just so I can play with my friends. It does feel strange to pirate the games you own, though.
Still, these fests of digital ownage and sleep deprivation also allow me to enjoy games that I would not even touch with a 10ft pole. Take FlatOut 2 for example. A friend of mine wanted to play it, because "it has a low learning curve". This translates to only needing the throttle and steering, the rest is just to fill the controls section. On my own, I'd hate it. Simple games are fun, games that require you to be brainless aren't. But when you play it with 7 friends, driving in school buses and using as much nitro as possible... it rocks.

Oh, and suddenly all of my friends are getting Team Fortress 2! Finally I can play with them online often and not just once or twice a year. Producing a 'bullet hell' is more fun when you can enjoy the game with a friend.
Halo 3: ODST proves that Halo can be good, without Rambo Master Chief, the game becomes way more enjoyable. Maybe the fact that ODST actually has a proper story helps. Meh, at least I like it. I bought it so I could play it with a friend over at his place. But what they don't say on the box is that you can only play with 2 players per console, instead of the original's 4.
Dammit.

Tomorrow I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I'd be lying if I said that I'm not exited. Ever since the D&D Game Day, I've become addicted to a game that I haven't really played yet. My character will be a Shaman, I have a strange feeling that I'm being very original again...

I need to play more Magic.

P.S.: While at the LAN-party, I've found out that people that do not know their classics like Frogger exist... Still, the "Dude, I didn't have a console till the PSone/Xbox"-excuse doesn't cover that fail. You know who you are.

The great thing about blogs is that blogs are written by writers, actual people. Unlike any larger website, they can be silent when there is nothing to say. Any 'silly season' (at least Wikipedia tells me that the English call 'komkommertijd' that way) is not filled with random talk. Updates can suddenly vanish from the surface of the internet that way. When I quit WoW last month, this blog's silly season began. The game simply wasn't the game I loved any more, so I quit.

Luckily I have been picking up my regular activities like an unhealthy lust for Xbox achievements and even got me a new interest: Dungeons and Dragons.
My local game store, the same as where I usually play Magic, held the worldwide game day for D&D, so I figured I'd try it out. I got hooked immeadiatly. Not because of the roleplaying, I mean, one of the people in my party had a backstory which involved an applepie handing out rings of flight, which got stolen by an ostrich (-> flying ostrich), which in turn left the character wanting to kill and loot every bird in sight in hopes of finding the ring. I'm always up for silly things, but even I have limits. The fact that we had pre-generated characters, instead of creating our own, didn't help either.
The combat and gameplay really made up for it and that's what made me want more.

I am what one might call a Power Gamer. When I can level a stat, I will. When I can earn more points in something, I will. It's why I like RPGs so much and why I am so addicted to achievements. I mean, I maxed out LEGO Indiana Jones and contemplated to do the same with Kung Fu Panda (let me add that to my to-do-list).
Dungeons and Dragons also touches that aspect, granting me experience for tons of things and so on. But it is also a cooperative game. The players and the DM work towards one single goal: to have fun. Refreshing.

I have to say, it feels odd to be hooked to a game that I haven't even really played yet. Ever since that single afternoon, all things D&D have become incredibly interesting. I am even busy creating my own campaign setting (although I did most of the work whilst waiting for an achievement to unlock. Damn you Dead Rising!).
Luckily I already got me a group of somewhat experienced people to play with and next Sunday will be the first time I really get to play it. And since I am so original, I'm rolling a Shaman.