Quake 4 review

Man, it has been a while. I could'nt updatew this blog because I did not have easy access to a computer. So now that I'm back, I will get the ball rolling (again) with a review of Quake 4. So, without further ado, here is the review:

For tose of you unfamiliar with the Quake series, it is rather popular fps that started with a weird, so-so beginning installment. After that firts game, the series picked up the slack with the spectacular, but still flawed, Quake 2. This game had almost nothing to do with the first one, and it seems like the developers just slapped the name on the game to genarate more sales. It placed you as a lone marine, part of landing force to invade the home planet of the Strogg, an alien race of cyborg( note: im using a weird keyboard, so forgive an typos).

The series had some more luck with Quake 3: arena. While this installment did nothing to further the plot, it was still a pretty decent shooter. It was an arena based game and probaly draws insparation from the Unreal Tournement line of games.

Now for Quake 4. This game is the first one in the series to somehow relate to the games in the series. You played as the same marine from Quake 2, and fought pretty much the same enemies. Once again, your ship crash-lands but luckily, most of your squad makes it. You then proceed to fight through a good amount of enemies with your squadmates and pick up a different, but not unoriganal, set of weaponry. The graphics are pretty good by todays standards, but there is just really not to much new here. If you like fps's, then this is defenetly worth checking out. While it may not do anything new, what it does it does REAL good.
Overall 8 out of 10.

Phsyche outs

While I was playing 40k yesterday, I realized something very interesting. Now in this game, I had added to my army The Nightbringer. He is basicly the best unit in the game. He is definetly not un-killable, but my opponent seemed to think so. He gave him an exteremely wide birth, and he never enen tried to attack. I then occured to me that, maybe, I had phsyched him out to the point where he thought his only defense was to run away. This huge fear of The Nightbringer handed me an easy win, and I think this could apply to other games as well.

Lets say your up against some guy who is ranked number 3 in GoW. You might not even try to attack him, even if you have a heavy advantage. This gives him an even further advantage, and this can really criple. If this happens to you or your teamates, remember one thing: stick together. The best player probaly can't kil 3 average players. If this dosnt work, then you are pretty much screwed.

In conclusion, do NOT get phsyched out.

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade Review

I have been doing a lot of posts about Warhammer 40k and it seem's like I have forgotten about it's video game translation. Dawn of War: Dark Crusade is, basicly, 40k on a pc. In most strategy games you make villagers or workers to collect reources. Not DoW. Here you train miltary units to capture strategic points. So I might train a couple of Scouts early on in the game( like in the first minute) to capture some strategic points. Then yu can augment the effectiveness with little mini forts built on top of them. While this a good system, at later times in the game it becomes far to easy or far too hard to gain resources, depending on the selected map. Another notable feature of this game is the pace. If you attack early on (known as rushing) in other games, your army will probaly be ready for the attack in the first 13 minutes. In this game, to be good at rushing you need to attack n the first 7 minutes.

All the races in this game play extremely differently, and it is nearly impossible to master them all. I can't win against the computer with Eldar, but I could own two at the same time with Necrons. The battles are extremely well translated from the game. Morale plays a huge in the game, along with cover and, my favorite, terrain. All these elements add a certain flare to this game that simply can not be found anywhere else.
Since it's a standalone expansion pack, you don't need the other Dawn of War games to play it.

But if your interested in multiplayer, it is definetly worth getting the other two, becuse even if you have all the single player content, it' mp is still worth trying.
Thi game is a real bargain for thirty bucks, so over all you have to get it.
over all 9 out of 10.

The WarchIefs review

If you have plaued AOE3, then you have probaly realied its main fault: no variety in races. Some of them have interesting gimmicks to them ( ottomans ) and some of them are just plain screwed. Now the Warchiefs takes this problem and adds three new races which are extremely different then the other races. They are the Lakota, Siux ( probaly really bad spelling), and Aztecs. The two main differences between these and the other races are that they have a Fire Pit and a Warchief. The Warchief is a extremely powerful explorer unit, but not to the point were you can ruh with him. He gets more powerful as you age up, so he is never really useless. The other difference is that you can assighn villagers to dance at the fire pit, and thi will give your civ varius perks. The most useful of these is a major bump in unit production. This i a really nice thing as it lets you specilize your civ to a whole new level. These are the main difference, but each new race has a heavy specilization in a certain field:

Siux: these guys are extremely god with hores, and as such they ahve extremely good with them, but they also have en extremely overpowered infrinty uni, the Wakina Rifle.

Lakota: All around pretty good and they are the best race t start out with out of all the Indians.

Aztecs: they have the best infantry.Period.

This is an allaround good expansion pack, but you can still play the game without it and feel satisfied. Only for those who have played the original game to death, but If you find a copy cheap, its worth picking up.
Overall 8 out of 10

Age of Empires 3 review

If you like strategy, then you should defintely be familiar with this series. It was one of the fathers of the genre. With this newest installment, not much changes. They updated the engine, aged up the game ( it went from swords and bows in AOE2 to rifles and cannons in AOE3). The biggest change however, is not in new units, but the cities you play as. In the past games, you would choose your civ while setting up the game. They were all balanced and each one had pros and cons. Now the new system allows you to choose your civ and upgrade its shipments, along with naming it's explorer. You can then level up your civ and gain new shipments. A shipment is a one time boost, for example I could get 5 or so musketeers from one. Each shipment is treated as a card, and everytime you level up your civ you get to pick a new one. To level up your civ, kill enemies and do other useful things to add experience to your civ. Once you have a predetermined amount, you level up get a new card. Once your done messing around with all that stuff and decide to take your new civ for a test drive, you will have to wait to get to the right age to use your shipment. You get new shipments ( in game, that is) by amassing a certain amount of exp. You need more exp for each shipment.

The basic gameplay is very simple: Collect resources, build troops, get more resoucres, age up, rinse and repeat. This simple formula is easy to get a basic grasp for, but very difficult to master. It has some flaws, such as bad pathfinding( if I tell you to get food, dont walk through the enemys foward base!) and some civs are underpowered, but overall, this is a must for fans of the series and definetly worth checking out for strategy gamers.
Overall 8.5 out of 10
P.S check ni tomorrow, when I will probaly review the expansion pack, The War Cheifs( unless some really urgent comes up).

oops

I hit the publish button too many times.

Owning Tau

I play Necrons in 40k, and my most colmmonly played enemy is the Tau. As such I have devised a cunning plan for owning them. Anyway, here it is
Phase 1 army planning: make sure to take as many units with infiltrate and deep strike as possible. Necrons are especially proficeint with this strat ( cough deepstrike monilith and infiltrate flayed ones cough)

Phase 2 You must deepstrike and infiltrate into position to hit high priority targets such as Fire Warriors and the Ethreal. Don't even try to kill the Kroot untill all the Fire Warriors are dead. They make up the core of any Tau army. Once they are dead kill the rest fo the Kroot. If you succeed, the opponent will have his fire bases and safeguards taken out from under his feet. You should then try to encircle the vehcicles and wear them down with loads of fire.

Phase 3 Continusly fire on the enemy and wear them down while your main close combat units move closer and eventually engage the enemy units.

Phase 4 Do not gloat about your victory. Instead, tell them how good this blog is and tell them to check it out sometime.

Has the Wii been left behind?

While I currently think the Wii is going strong, while browsing through the new isue of Game Informer, I realized tht there was not a single wii game featured here that interested me one bit. The three or so games that were coming out for the Wii were : Cooking Mama cook off, escape from bug island, and Legend of the dragon. The two Wii games that were getting reveiwed,far cry and wario ware, both scored low. Now the Wii has some very good games out for it,
But it but it seems like there are two sets of games coming: ones for 360 and Ps3, and ones for Wii. With last gen, if there was a big realease, it came out for all the consoles. But now if they release,say, star wars battlefront 3, it is sort of doubtful that it would come out for the Wii, mainly becasue the the Wii is so different then its competitors. So when will publishers relize that they NEED to realease some real games for the Wii. When people buy the Wii, they probaly want real games, NOT a series of minigames or cooking crap. Now I am not saying that Rayman: Raving Rabbids is a bad game, In fact I hear it is quite good, but when 10 lookalkes get relesed, something is not quite right. There are some games that are very good on the Wii (coughexitetruckcough) and some games that get an average score of 11.5 out out of ten(hack up lung twililight Princess) but most peaple do not want to play Cooking Mama cook off bundled with Arise, Fishing Master (both of these are actual games, probably releasing in the states this year). So when will will publishers release atcual games for Wii? I dont know, but if the only games that are not gimmicky crap and that will have SOME mainstream interest are Madden and Call of Duty this year, the it doesnot look to good for the Wii. Now I am not biased against the Wii, but I do not want to play minigames for the rest of the year. Some of the big realeases are not coming out on the Wii, such as Rainbow Six vegas, Star Wars the force unleashed, Assasins creed and a lot more. So it seems by innovating, Nintendo has excluded a lot more mainstream games then they should have. Please comment!

Host booting

While playing GoW today I came across an interesting dilemma. As soon as I joined, one of the players left. I asked one of my teammates if he said he was going to leave. My teammate said that that the host wanted to boot him because he was too good, and probaly went through with it. Then I thought: should he really boot him just because he was better. Now the score was set at 3-2 with the other team winning. Just for privacys sake, im not going to tell you the gamertags here. Now the good player had about 7 or so kills and the other guy only had 1, so the host booted not because he unbalancing the game, but because he was extremely good. Please comment.

Co-op

While playing Gears on co-op, I thought: this is way too easy. These levels are clearly designed for 1 player. Would'nt it be sweet if designers made a couple of levels solely for single player? Unforunately, Gears does not have this mode yet... but maybe gears 2 will! I would not mind a shorter single player campaign if they implemented a small or medium sized campaign solely for co-op. But they should still keep co-op in the single player, as that will add some extra depth.

Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines day!!! With any luck you won't have as much trouble finding a date as this guy:

Homeschooling

As you may have noticed, I homeschool. It's not perfect, but hey, making this blog counts as a lesson ( it's fun too). It's got pros and cons, and here is a quick list of them:
Pros:
Blogging counts as a lesson, loads of free time, about 4 more hours of free time, a pretty good social life, no home work, stronger friendships, boatloads of new opportunities.

Cons:
No guaranteed time to see my friends, harder to meet new friends, less common playdates, see some friends a lot less then others, harder to find out if you're behind the curve of learning (I'm not luckily ).

Welcome to Gears of War. How would you like your chainsaw?

I'm here to report a problem with the structure of many online games. If you are a n00b in lets say, Dawn of War Dark Crusade, odds are you will be put off by a brutal Space Sarine rush ( I'm talking about the video game, not the tabletop game) and be killed in the first ten minutes. Same thing for GoW with chainsaws and snipers. Same thing for Unreal Tournament 2004 with flak cannons. Almost every game will have some weakness like this and only the hardest of the hardcore will stick with it. Even I have fallen victim to this, when I played SvW 2007 for the first time I felt like the entire game was a cutscene where my character always got owned.

However there may be a solution. Send a friend request to that n00b you just owned and make a private game with him. Then own him to get your wins up!!! No, just kidding. Teach him how to play, then help him out in a game or two. Once he gets good, tell him to do the same thing you did to him with some other n00bs. Then, with any luck everybody will get better( or it could backfire and result with certain people getting owned every time).

Gears review!

Gears of War is a tactical shooter. Well, some people would not call it tactical. They would call it chainsawing the heck out of anything you feel like. Single player is probaly the best part, as the developers really put alot into the artwork. They have a whole destroyed beauty theme going, and this is very obvious and it really helps convey the sense of desparation. The combat is extremely fresh, with your character hiding behind cover while bullets chip away at everything near you. The ai is up to spec, but nothing particuarlly special about it. At least they are not getting stuck behind pillars every few seconds. I have played single player round 12 hours and I have never seen the ai glitch. Now, dont think its not challenging, this is one of the most challenging games I have played in a good long time. But the difficulty is just perfect!!! Anyway Gears of War is probaly THE best game I have played(easily up there with Half-life and Halo).
Overall I am giving it a 9.5 out of 10.

Space Marines

It just occuered to me that, if you are going to play WarHammer 40k( or 40k for short) do NOT use Space Marines. about 50 percent off all players decide to play them, and thbey are extremely nooby! If your gonna play, you might as well play a GOOD race like Imperial Guard or Eldar. I play Necrons, and everytime I play against my freinds, anyone watching says "Im gonna go pick up some Necrons" nad I always say" WE dont need another Necron player!". So, in short


Dont play Space Marines!!!!
these guy suck!! imo!!

Note: I am not saying that the race as a whole sucks, but about 80 percent of the players who play them suck. I am fortunate enough to know one of the GOOD players and he is quite lethal( but I still owned him hardcore).

Frohman!!

I just remembered a funny comic called Concerned :the half-life and death of Gordon Frohman. If you have played any Half-life games, this will be the funniest thing ever. In fact, even if you havent play Half-life, this will be funny.
http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-05-01

Gamertags

If you feel like playing with me in a video game, here are my gamertags

Xbox live: funkyskunk5
Dawn of War dark crusade: Viper_Here
Runescape: funkyskunk5
Age of Empires 3: funkyskunk5

I will accept all friend requests!

WarHammer 4000

While some of you may be familiar with Dawn of War, that game is based of another game: WarHammer 40k.
This game is not a video game, but a tabletop strategy gme. Basicly, you make a force out of small figures ( think plastic army men, but more expensive) and command them against another player. This game is real fun, and I suggest you buy the starter set battle for Macragge at www.gamesworkshop.com and start owning immediately!

Gears lag problems

Gears of War is a nearly perfect game. One of its few flaws is lag. While playing on multiplayer, even against people living only 20 or so miles away, you will have to lead your shots several feet away( and thats if you have a good connection) and nearly make mp unplayable. If you like Gow online, then this really cripples you. I cant play any player matches because I have a couple prefered players and if I use quick match, I will almost always have a 2 second lag. Because of this, I almost always play ranked. This really suck, cause you can't really play with your freinds. Epic, if you read this, please,please fix the lag! I, for one, do not need any new maps and 'nade tagging is fine, so fix the lag!

my first post!

This is gonna own!! Anyway, this is gonna be a gaming blog about pretty much whatever I feel like( gears of war, Dark messaih, oblivion, morrowind, ut,etc).