Path of Exile: FOR THE LOVE OF ODIN PLAY THIS!

You know, do not even ask me about the "Forsaken Masters" part as I do not really know.  But Path of Exile, I do not think I have ever sunk this much time into a free-to-play game.  Even the previously mentioned Clash of Clans or Plants vs. Zombies 2.  No, not even Mafia Wars, which was way back in the day, as far as I am concerned.

At the moment I have put 35 hours into this game, although that number seems to be growing week-by-week.  But let us talk about the game.

Bloody hell this game is beautiful, just take a look at this dank and infested dungeon!

and a spectral-esque-type forrest.

Now if I only played good looking games, there would be room for an argument here, but I am also playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls: The Arena which looks a lot like Doom with a sword and heal potions.  PoE plays remarkably well too.  Think Diablo, with bits of Torchlight II thrown in (stationary waypoints) as well as MMORPG action hot key type actions as well.   There are even some improvements such as removable gem socketing in weapons and armor without damaging either the equipment or the gems.  I think that is one of the things that helped to sell the game.  

There are even little individual animations that the enemies do.  For instance, an enemy archer will run towards you, stop, pull an arrow from their quiver, lick the fletching, knock the arrow then fire towards you.  That is, if you haven't already shot them yet.  If you zoom in as close as you can, you can see the corpses of fallen enemies twitching a couple of times before they lie permanently prone.  At first I thought it was either a glitch or my eyes playing tricks, but no, you can see hands and feet twitching a few times.  Sometimes monsters will also roar at you before or during attacks, you know, because their wild animals that just happen to want you very dead.

Oddly enough, one of the best things about this games is all the ways Grinding Gear Games does not charge you to play and there are a lot of aspects to this game that I feel that could have been used to create options to pay real world money.  You want to enchant that sword to a +1 to damage, pay 50 gold (translates to $0.50).  You want to recover that life sapping gem from your armor that you no longer want, that will be 200 gold.  You want to create more than one character, pay us 500 gold to create extra character slots beyond your first character.  Of everything that I have seen that the game charges money for, everything appears to be cosmetic.  Sure you have your swag stashed in a chest that has four pages of a 12x12 grid and you can pay for a fifth page, but I do not foresee needing that much space considering I am currently only playing one character.

Basically, there was one time when I left the game for the sole purpose of finding out how I could give Grinding Gear Games money using real money.  Maybe buy a package thing via Steam using my Steam Wallet.  I could not.  There was nothing I could do but use their in-game market.  That was not was I was looking for, so I have yet to give them currency validation towards their great game.

Similar to Diablo and Torchlight, I do have a problem with hoarding.  When I found gems, I saved them until I could create the next higher quality gem, then I saved that gem until I could create the next. . .so on and so on.  I was always paranoid that I would find a better weapon or suit of armor and that gem that I had soldered into my equipment would then be lost forever.  Thankfully in PoE, this is not the case as I can take out and remove gems as frequently as I want (unless otherwise noted in the description of the gem).  Grinding Gear is making this game too easy to like and doing things that I had wanted earlier Diablo-esque games to do.

There are a handful of other features from the game that surprised me.  At first, I was annoyed that the maps were a lot smaller than what I was used to on Torchlight II, but I quickly realized that they were more like the Diablo maps and one of the sidequest goals is to kill every monster on the map.  That would be quite the feat in Torchlight II.  Another is that your health and mana potions autofill as you kill enemies and whenever you return to town, which makes healing spells almost obsolete.  It can become difficult however when you have to go up against a boss that does not want to summon creatures to help fight against you, which would then refill your potion bottles.

To date, I have only played cooperatively once with Chreekat a month or two back.  And while the game could be played with friends, you don't have to and I feel that playing locally would be a lot more fun than playing across the country.  That being said, I am usually up for playing cooperatively if people are interested.  That then brings me to the online-ness of the game.  Unless you are intentionally playing with anyones else, all the areas, with the exception of the towns/villages are instanced.  You do not have to worry about other people running around in the same area stealing your kills and loot.

The only negative statement I have to make about this game is that it takes a while to load.  The first couple of times I tried playing, I gave up because I thought the game was stuck on the loading screen.  It turned out that I just had to wait a minute or two, then everything was as I expected it to be.  There was no noticeable lag in the game and the only times the game had to load was moving between areas.

I am going to stop now so I can get this out there.  Path of Exile has been out there in the world for 13 months now and honestly, it is never too late to pick up this game and start playing.  So, you should go and start playing as it is just too much fun to not play.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Great Warriors of Doom and Wind

The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot: Chapter I: The Before

First, this is an awesome title for a game.  It'd even work well for a board game.  I feel like The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is advertising that knows what kind of game it is and knows what their target audience is looking for.  The title conjures up the image of a game of Diablo mixed with Gauntlet, but with an even greater sense of humor.

And the game is free.  That can either be a boon or a giant warning sign to stay away.  At least that's what I hear about free to play MMOs.  Sort of anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about as I've only played The Elder Scrolls Online (Beta) and a little bit of Neverwinter (which I will talk about at a future date).

Okay, back on topic.  TMQfEL (which seems more work than typing out the full title).  After watching the trailer for the open beta, I developed a slightly different view of the game.  Now, based off of the information from the trailer, the game still looks somewhat fun with a healthy portion of "Oh what the hell god damnit it you asshat."  TMQfEL, again based off of the trailer, looks to be a game where you create your own castle, wonderfully portrayed as floating castles, that you fill with x amount of loot wherein you build traps to protect that loot.

Logic would dictate that when you begin the game, you start out with a set amount of money, presumably "gold," to build and furnish your castle with traps, hazards and other golf-titled pitfalls to protect the aforementioned loot from the rest of the online community.  In order to get more gold to build more castle and better traps, you have to raid other castles.  I do not know if your character is able to level up, which would make sense on one level in that you would need additional HP in order to make it through elaborate castles filled with elaborate traps; that is unless all traps are considered one hit kills.  I also do not know if you would be able to keep any gold you found along the way if you are unable to make it out alive; again assuming that you find loot throughout the castle and not just in the final treasure vault room.  The downside though is that someone who has a character built up would be able to ransack and destroy other community castles that are just starting off.  The way around this is to only allow the players attack/raid/ransack/pillage/lay waste other castles within a certain range of levels that are close to their own.

Again, this is what I presume the game to be.

What I would be afraid of is people not creating castles to be clever, but to be total assholes.  I feel like a game that is created by a person to be as difficult as possible is no longer creating a game/stage/level to be fun, but to be a dick to the rest of the gaming community.  But sure, I recognize that there is a percentage of the population that enjoys a rigorous challenge (meaning the people who have beaten Super Meat Boy), I just happen to not be a part of that particular group.

Not my idea of fun.

So, with all that, I will now give The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot  a try and report back next week with how my hypothesis compares to the actual game in "Chapter II: The After."


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
I Want to Reconcile the Violence in Your Heart

Monthly Update: March 2014

Happy March everyone!  Happy Soon To Be Spring Equinox!  It'll be my birthday in just under three weeks!

An interesting little tid-bit that I found out last week was about the process to determine the day to celebrate Easter.  I know a lot about Easter as far as the Catholic holiday is concerned seeing as how I'm a "little heathen" as my mother likes to call me; it's a term of adoration as opposed to one of repulsion.  So apparently Easter is determined to be the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the Spring Equinox.  I don't know about you, but that process sounds very pagan to me.  I honestly don't know what the wording in the Bible says to make this determination as a floating day as opposed to a permanent day such as Christmas.  Anyone?

That aside, how was your February?  How is your March looking to be?

Beginning in the end of February and finishing up near the end of yesterday, I participated in another of Bethesda/Zenimax Online's beta tests for The Elder Scrolls Online.

I don't know about you, but I enjoy falling through a flight of stairs only to have my feet embedded in the underlying rock, then typing /stuck in order to kill myself, but only after I have submitted a bug report to the proper authorities.  Actually, I am quite enjoying this whole process.  Sadly, as has been the case with other ESO betas, but I had work all weekend so I wasn't able to participate as much as I would have liked.  I was able to invite Conklederp to join in on this beta test as well, but she was having a harder time with the download to play part.  I'm trying to figure out what is going on on her side before the early access launches later this month.

A few weeks back, I purchased an A/V Cable to HDMI converter with the hope that I would be able to play both my SNES and N64 on our super HD LED 1080p TV.  Without the converter, the TV cannot completely translate the signal that is coming from a 24 and 19 year old video gaming console.  This inability to correctly translate the console signal comes out as flashing colors on the screen as well as colored bars that move from top to bottom while the game is being played.  The converter was an attempt to fix this issue.  Sadly though, the converter I purchased, possibly through no fault of its own, did not fix this issue.  I am still on the lookout for a fix to this that does not include buying an older non HD TV, although that may end up being the final solution.

And now for some reason, the second half of this article decided that it didn't want to exist anymore.  After saving then closing down and coming back here to publish, everything that followed after the HDMI article is no longer here.  I guess it must not have been very good and knew it for it to want to off itself and I can respect that, even though I don't particularly like it.  So with that done then, I will go play a bit of FEZ as that was how I concluded the article after I talked a bit about free to play games that I had recently downloaded as well as noticing that Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is now available through Nintendo's eShop.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Underlying Theme

Full Review: The Plan (PC)

The Plan, a "game" of sorts developed by Krillbite Studio, the same people who are developing the first person survival horroresque game where you play as a two year old, probably does not require it's own full article, but you know what, it's going to happen because I enjoyed it that much.  I've played through three times and I think I enjoyed it more the second and third times around.

Krillbite describes the game as an "atmospheric videogame, exploring the issues of death and meaning."  I feel that The Plan, while it does allow the player to explore those issues, I feel that they happen after the game has finished.  And by finished, I mean that it will take you between 5 - 10 minutes to complete.  And believe it or not, the game comes with it's own achievement that is really more of an Easter egg than anything else.

So what exactly then is The Plan?  You begin the game as a fly with the camera very close up on you, almost uncomfortably close, especially if you are not personally fond of flies.  You then progress through the game/stage and slowly the camera pulls back and back, all the while the music in the background (from 19th century Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg) becomes more-and-more pronounced and powerful, but not obnoxiously so.

The game is very simplistic and very calming for the most part, considering that you are controlling something that most people tend to kill on site and cats for some reason like to eat.  I would say that it would be better to go into this game without any expectations although I did tell The Kid that she would "either like it or think it's absolute shit."  And really, that is all I feel you need to tell people, that the game is a small file (~120MB) that takes less than 10 minutes to play and if you don't like it, then you only lost maybe 20 minutes tops.

I just find that The Plan is a nifty little experiment from a video game studio that, from what I have seen from them, is true to their development philosophy, not to put words in their brains.  I highly recommend downloading this free game if for no other reason than to give your opinion about it and what defines a "video game" in todays market.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Concealment of Joyful Laughter