2007 Wishlist – Madmarkus

Happy new year!

2006, in gaming terms, frankly felt like a rather boring year to me. It picked up at the end, but overall it was pretty quiet.

So what do I want from 2007?

No More Mario: He’s a fat plumber. Seriously, it’s not funny, fun or anythng in between anymore. He sucks. We need to move on from this ancient plumber, if gaming is to develop. Even the best franchises should eventually die, and I personally never thought he was one of the best.
Chance of This Happening: A snowball’s chances in Hell.

No More Sonic: His games don’t work in 3D. So yeah.
Chance of This Happening: Spiderman’s chances of losing to the Shocker. I always felt sorry for the Shocker, he could never get a break. Then again, he dresses up in bloody bed linen, so he kinda deserves it.

More Coop: There’s a bit more about… but still not enough, and it’s time developers and publishers got off their fucking asses and start putting it in.
Chance of This Happening: Certain.

Duke Nukem Forever: Where’s the Duke?! God damn it!
Chance of This Happening: About the same as more than ten people reading this article.

Decent Game Reviewing Mags: Because 75% shouldn’t be an average score. It’s a good score. 50% should be an average score.
Chance of This Happening: 2%. (Ho ho ho, it’s Amiga Power’s joke score! Or is it? Or IS it? OR IS IT? etc, etc.)

Use those Marvel Licenses properly, please, for the love of god: Having played Marvel: Nemesis and owning Marvel Ultimate Alliance, I can confirm they’re being wasted a lot of the time. Horrible voice actors and none of the heroes even feel right., I mean, having Spider-Man voiced by the guy who did the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four cartoon when the human torch is in the same game is just wrong.
Chance of This Happening: About the same as the no doubt EA Licensed Iron Man game that will come out just before the movie actually being good.

Dead Rising 2: And it better not be a fucking PS3 exclusive like the rumors say.
Chance of This Happening: Coming out in 2007? None. Being Ps3 exclusive… sadly higher.

Halo 3: I just want to get the inevitable disappointment over with.
Chance of This Happening: Pretty damn certain. It’ll definitely come out, too, I reckon.

Game Developers and Publishers growing some Fucking Balls: Next time you think about putting in a rape/murder/gang beating scene but then think you’ll get in trouble with the Jack Thompson brigade, fucking put it in anyway. If moviemakers are allowed to put serious content in, so are you.
Chance of This Happening: George Bush’s chances of winning the next American Election. Which might be higher than you think, even though he’s not allowed to be a candidate. But, yeah, it’s not happening.

Jack Thompson to Die in Fire: He will not be forgiven.
Chance of This Happening: Certain. Trust me.

A Job: I know I can manage it this year. I just know it!
Chance of This Happening: Is there a number lower than zero? *sob*

Shaman buffing: It’s got to happen, for gods sake. “But you’re a hybrid, you’re not supposed to be really good!” By this logic you must nerf Paladins. Until their arms fall off.
Chance of This Happening: Let’s face it, none.

To Start Work on some kind of Game: BECUZ I’D BE ASSOME DESINER
Chance of This Happening: PRETY GUD I JUS NED GRAFIX AND SOUND AND CODE

I’ll add more later maybe. Probably.

Sky’s the Limit

And the sky is about 2-5 kB/s.

This new net connection is awful! I hope it’ll liven up a bit in the coming weeks, that or I bet my fathers got some torrents running.

I thought i’d mention some things i’ve been doing without my internet connection;

I decided to hit an ASCII game that got two pages in PCGamer and was featured on two seperate editions of their DVD. It goes by the name of Dwarf Fortress, don’t let the horrific website deter you, nor the ASCII nature, the game is simply ingenius.

I’ve also been revisiting Warcraft 3 and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, replaying my favourite levels. I also sank some time into making my own map, typical campaign map in nature and no-where near finished, but I’m willing to share it with you. Be warned, its only got beta Cinematics + custom hero skills. You’ll need Frozen Throne to play it.

I also played Diablo 2 through, no expansion – someone still hasn’t returned it! GRR! – , I got to the final Boss of Act 2 with a Soceress /w Frost Magic. Its impossible. So I cheated and mauled the game through with a Super-Heroin. Take that imbalanced boss and class natures you shit. Nerf the boss Blizzard, making him vulnerable to freeze/slow.

I’m going to try and play WoW with 4,000 Latency … See you around, hope you’re having a good holiday.

James.

Happy Holidays Part II

Hope you enjoy Christmas, mine is shit so far. Half past five in the afternoon and we haven’t even opened the presents… but more of that later.

Have a good one.

Happy Holidays

Just a quick post, to all of you who celebrate Christmas, from the team here at Modern-Gamers we wish you all the best.

Happy Holidays,
Merry Christmas,
and I hope your New Years is superb to.

So say we all … See what I did there? … No? … You suck.

Disclaimers

I’ve come to realise something, I can be a very very bitter person, especially with regards to video games.

We recently had a bit of a spat on a Forum concerning Oblivion and after a few angry posts I came to realise that the things I was saying we complete overstatements. Whilst I really don’t consider it contender for best game ever, it is a pretty decent attempt.

It uses experimental Graphics technology, I only don’t like it because my Graphics Card isn’t good enough to check all the boxes. Mind, PC Gamer’s Devil’s Advocate even wrote a negative review about a particular Graphics Technology, of which our reference of “Atomic Sheen!” is lifted.

It uses an uncommon levelling system, which I believe to be clumsy and unfriendly, but to hardened Elder Scroll’s fans it probably feels like home.

There is a vast number of other criticisms I have, but its necessary for me to say this.

I followed Oblivion through its creation, just as I did with Morrowind, and when you allow yourself to be immersed in the hype, you will always come out disappointed. With Oblivion I have, but what baffles (and angers me) is that no-one else really did.

Therefore, when reading articles consider these points:

The opinions expressed within this site are not necessarily subjective in anyway.

Opinions are never wrong, so by a process of elimination, we’re always right.

Any opinion on a game has no true bearing on how good it actually is, thats why there are experts.

Whilst some measures are taken to ensure bias is removed from some posts, harsh opinions may remain.

Thats all on the matter, i’d like to quickly say I really like the current Website Title Bar … Title … I’ll quote it in case it changes:

“H-h-how can you challenge a perfect, immortal blog?”

Admittedly it took me two readings to get what its parodying, if you can guess it, post a comment! But don’t cheat, you gain nothing.

Over and most certainly out.

Urg

Brief update post.

I’ve got no internet at home.

I’m “Borrowing” a neighbours wireless to post this.

I drank myself ill.

I’m going to be sick.

Mark, stop slacking.

Have a nice holiday.

You are Not Prepared

Liez, I am totally prepared to watch this!

The official The Burning Crusade Cinematic Intro Video, includes Illidan and of course the two new races.

The graceful introduction of both Dranei and Blood Elves were quite good actually, it sums their individual race up fairly well, but I won’t ruin it for you

TBC Is so close I can almost taste it.

Other links:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9104497525264407391&q=tbc+intro
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/downloads/
http://media.worldofwarcraft.com/bc-cinematic/en_US/WOWXP-EN.htm

Cheers,
JamesR.

X2: The Threat

Space. The Final Frontier.

The designers of X2, Egosoft, were very clever when designing the game. Realising that Space is indeed the final frontier, they’ve made it impossible to get anywhere. Be it in the limited area that apparently consists of space, or in the main storyline.They’ve made the game so slow and so impossible that we will probably discover warp engines and go into space in the time it would take me to complete it. Not that you’d want to, as the game has one rather fatal flaw. Even more fatal than equipping your ship with no shields or weapons so powerful they drain your engines in one shot.

Space is as dull as hell.

I’ve seen one pirate. One pirate who wasn’t part of the story, anyway. He did not attack me. He did not attack anyone. He just did nothing. That is not a pirate, really. It confuses me how many scanners knew he was a pirate, but I’ll have to trust their utterly confusing readouts.

Trade? Unfortunately, that’s nearly impossible as barely anyone lets you buy their products. And even if you can, I guarantee that the only station buying at a reasonable price is at the other end of the fucking galaxy. You’d jumpdrive there… if you had ten times the amount of cash you have right now which is needed to buy a jumpdrive… which you get from trading. In the meantime, you’ll have to use the gates in each zone, which take about ten minutes to bloody get to.

If you do get some combat, it’s crap. They can’t hit you, you can’t hit them very much… so you have half hour battles where you chip your enemies down with lucky shots. Gee whiz.

The missions are impossible. One particular example comes to mind, where you must examine a damaged jumpgate. It’s surrounded by mines, so you must try to use your spacesuit get close enough. The mines are essentially invisible to the naked eye. Do the math.

I certainly hope X3 was better. I still won’t be buying it.

On the plus side, it’s a very beautiful game, even for a three year old one. Except the people models, which are strangely misshapen and aren’t really well animated and have voice actors from off the street. Same old, same old.

I Say: “Moving furniture provides more entertainment – You feel like you’ve done something.”
One word: Dull.
It’s: Pretty > Slow > Far too big for its own good.
It’s not: Exciting as parking a car. > Exciting as watching paint dry. > Exciting.

Score: 45%

Red (5) Faction

News of Red 5’s formation is not anything new, but their project it seems is gathering momentum and support.

Red 5 is a company consisting largely of former Blizzard employees who have licensed the Offset Engine [1] for their up and coming project. Offset’s engines are regarded as some of the most visually compelling engines to date and looking at the images on their website I’d have to agree.

However, news more recently broke about their success in gathering funding, all $18.5 Million of it. The Venture Capital firms backing them have an ever increasing (in size and success) portfolio of Web-based Firms which bodes well for Red 5.

They do however have big shoes to fill, the company’s CEO Mark Kern (Great name btw) was previously the Project Leader for the perpetually successful World of Warcraft.

With Red 5 rarely appearing on the Radar I hope with their new Venture Capital success we will see their first project proposals soon. To finish I’ll quote their website: “Our mission is simple: we want to make the best online games possible and have fun doing it.”

I wish them the best of luck and hope to read about them in the not to distant future.

Ciao

More like White Coats.

Brown coats rejoice! Our beloved FireFly is being ressurected, but not in flesh and blood with Nathan Fillion whooping ass across the universe.

Take your seats.

Firefly is being ressurected by Multiverse a project headed by Ex-Netscape Employees with the aim of becoming “the world’s leading network of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and 3D virtual worlds.” Well quite frankly, they are far too late, but is there hope for FireFly?

Well a brief spell upon the Multiverse website has tought me alot in the ways of Liberal Hippy Propaganda, after all … “This is the start of a revolution” … apparently. I do respect some of the things they have said though. Multiverse may seem like they are just trying to break into the market, but it would seem there is a Robin-Hood situation going.

They are trying to create a platform unto which modders can come together to create the mods they always wanted, in the format they could never achieve. A Noble cause perhaps, but is this really the solution? Should modders really be working on this platform, pioneered by Suits that used to work on Netscape, is this not against the spirit?

I would personally feel much better if amateur designers had produced a poorer simpler engine, but instead this overly hardware spec heavy engine seems to be the utter opposite of their own mission. It’s about as accessible as Mary Magdeline’s crotch, after Ninja Jesus had his piece.

Anyway, from what (admittedly) little i’ve seen, it would not be in the interests of FireFly to create this game. The brand will only suffer from being brought to this engine and that is the last thing I want.

Why is it that of all the MMOs i’ve played, only one is an accessible game that -anyone- can get into, and I don’t even need to say it.

Be sure to see what Wired had to say, I won’t bother linking the Brown Coats Abode, as its just full of fans glad to see a revival without thinking of the consequences.

Late Edit – I checked Wikipedia for what it had to say on the topic of Multiverse, no suprise it has only good things to say, but check it out. See what the ‘experts’ have to say.

Oh and Fox, seriously … What the Fuck! Its one of the most sucessful Sci-Fi DVD Revivals in history, why not fund another series? But you’re happy to let this shite happen.

For Shame.

I must make my threats, but I will do so in an uber-small font so not to offend:
Seriously, I will fucking disembowel your family and feed their entrails to hungry sharks whilst putting to work constant electric shocks to your extremities untill each and every nerve ending in your body is dead, then I will saw off your limbs – whilst you’re concious – and leave you to soak in a vat of sulphuric acid.

Enjoy your week.