Warlords of Draenor

By / / Leave a Comment / WoW / ,

Yep, I gave in. Was sick at home for over a week with the flu, so in the last days (on Thursday the 27th to be exact) I bought WoD, paid for  a month and started levelling. Still couldn’t really leave the house (just the way to the doctor and pharmacy had been hell earlier in the week), so I grabbed a big pot of tea, wrapped myself in a blanket and levelled my Rogue from 90 to 100 until Friday evening.
In the start I hated it. Or to be more precise, I didn’t have a lot of fun. It was just more of the same. I liked the abundance of Rares and Shinies to find and enjoy and the new Pickpocketing is ace. But overall, not too thrilling. It got a bit better as the garrison developed. Now I am sitting at iLvl 621 after the weekend after around 6 Heroics and my Warrior is already 93. Didn’t play WildStar in the last 4 days, so it can’t be that bad. I still don’t plan to raid – but we’ll see what will happen in these remaining 25 days. 🙂

Stuff is happening… slowly

By / / Leave a Comment / EVE Online, WildStar / , ,

Sick at home, actually so bad that I can’t sit and play for more than an hour or two, so haven’t undocked in EVE (my new favorite game) in a few days.
Blogging would be totally possible, with a laptop in bed, just that nothing really happened. Plus I hope my sentences make sense.
Despite all of this I managed to level my Mordesh Stalker from 19 to 35 in the last 2 weeks or so, only adding a few of those levels in the last days, so at least something to write down. Awesome.
Failed the Malgrave Trail Veteran Adventure run on my main by a small margin on first try, so nothing really new there, it will still take tremendous time to get attuned.

Android Games roundup

By / / Leave a Comment / Mobile

Stuff I liked, mostly puzzle games

Stuff I had installed but never tried?

Stuff I hated

And yes, “My apps” on the play store is quite handy for such a list.

What now?

In summary, I am not too impressed with all the Android games I tried. I loved hardly any of those, I liked a few, but mostly they entertained me for not very long.
 
I’ve never been a big “mobile” gamer, my only real console was a Game Boy Advance that I used from 2002 to 2005 maybe, thus I will speak in terms of what I know:
Everything twitchy is out, as I hate the controls on the phone (Tetris, Dr. Mario, Xenon 2).
Same for Jump’n’Runs and Racing basically. (Super Mario Land, Mario Kart)
I am not in the mood for RPGs right now, so anything like Zelda, Golden Sun or Pokémon is out.
And I’ve never been a huge fan of Mega Man, Castlevania or Metroid.
Picross could work well I think. And Great Little War Game reminds me of Advance Wars of Final Fantasy Tactics.

A tale of two new worlds

By / / Leave a Comment / City-building, RTS, WildStar / , , ,

Played WildStar again yesterday for the first time in like 2 weeks because of vacation and stuff. It is fun, still. Levelled a pair of Chua (my Esper and an Engineer, both Scientists) to level 12, can’t wait for housing. A bit undecided about Megaservers. On the one hand I don’t see a big problem, but renaming always sucks (even only adding a surname, I remember SW:TOR. I hated the Legacy and then still having to rename a char after a forced server transfer/merge – meh)
In the evening I had a craving for some strategy and building things, so I dug out the old Anno 1503 (The New World) box (so it really is more than 11 years old) and it actually ran quite ok. Everything that was annoying is still annoying though, of course. Maybe the time has come to look for a discounted copy of Anno 2070 (2011) or Anno 1404 (2009) now.  As long as you can manage to run a decently long game without any warfare I’m set.

Is this what the summer hole feels like?

By / / Leave a Comment / WildStar / , ,

According to Twitter I hit Level 50 on my Spellslinger on August, 3rd – did a week full of dailies, then finally levelled another toon (Human Exile Female Medic) to 15 – which was great fun, by the way – and stopped playing for 2 weeks. Like, not played anything. Watched a few seasons of tv series on DVD and had other stuff to do, but no gaming. Hardly any time, not in the mood.

Today I did the dailies again. Although I hate dailies, WildStar is still a fun game. I just hope I’ll find back to a more regular playing schedule mid-September and maybe finally try some instances.

Completed: Game Dev Tycoon

By / / Leave a Comment / Completed, Games /

At today’s Steam Summer Sale I grabbed Game Dev Tycoon for around 4 EUR. I started to play around noon and just now, after 6h I am finished.
Small intermission: There’s only a handful of games I really ever completed, on the SNES I just remember one Clay Fighter title, for example – I usually give up somewhere midway, and this week I already completed 2, yay me.
So, the game is about running a small game studio from one man in a garage to being a multi-million (I didn’t manage billions) company with employees.
gdt_final
I like the art style, it’s basic, but absolutely good enough. The music is nice and did not annoy me even after 6h despite being a little repetitive. I never worked in games development, but it’s a pretty damn accurate portrayal of software development in general, just enough details to not be wrong, without needless stuff players are probably not interested in (imho).
Apparently I unlocked 15/33 (45% of Achievements).

  • I got surprisingly few things to criticize:
  • The “selected features” when creating a new game are somewhat like a tech tree, i.e. you replace “Stereo Sound” with “Surround Sound”, but the UI does not group them. So either you throw the old ones out in your new game engine (which is kind of final and you might not always want to do that) or you click around a little too much. Cheap win for UX. (nice to have)
  • Events that occur to you can’t be postponed. No problem for donation calls or something, but just at the end (without spoilering) I would have liked to send my whole team on vacation for a month before they undertook this massive event that popped up and I could just accept or decline. (Surprisingly, the only non-exhausted developer came ahead. I snickered.) (The game doesn’t punish you, but would be nice and would add depth to your decisions)
  • Game Conventions should need planning. This one G3 (hehe) is announced to be “in 4 weeks” – but I have no timetable, if I can ship my game just before. Then again the game apparently does not care if I announce Vaporware or have a fresh title. (nice to have)
  • You can speed up most info dialogs by clicking, just not the 2 of them: visitor numbers from game conventions and reviews for your game. Why, why, why? “Click for instant text and dismiss the animation after the 10th time” – this was really annoying in the end. But to be fair it made me get up every hour and fetch a drink or something. Maybe educational 🙂
  • After playing for some hours you have just too many games and they are presented badly in the Game History. Bonus points for allowing arrow keys, but next playthrough I will open an Excel sheet on the second screen or have some pen and paper handy. I don’t miss that from the 90s games – but I think it could help, unless the Game History would be presented better (gets tedious after your first 20-30 games) for games to be grouped, filtered or sorted.
  • That’s it – not much that was not super fun.

Oh, and here are my final stats:
gdt2gdt1

Whitevale finished

By / / Leave a Comment / WildStar / ,

After a few days of slacking and playing other games I hit 30 today and finished up Whitevale.
I liked the zone, but it was a bit much running around.
A few notes on professions:

  • One Tailoring quest seems to be bugged, I can’t discover the recipe
  • As a Tailor, Relic Hunting seems a bit pointless. Saving the mats up for now.
  • Cooking seems very complicated, haven’t started yet.

Spellslinger is still fun to play, but a bit squishy. If my pocket Warrior doesn’t have aggro, I have to shield and stun and heal quite a bit.

Weekend wrapup

By / / Leave a Comment / WildStar / , , ,

Thanks to the prolonged Pentecost weekend there was stuff happening.
OK, I didn’t level that much because we finally had some sun ’round here, but still… Spellslinger is nearly 21 and Stalker is 15 and has a lot and a mount.
I am not 100% happy with questing as a duo. Yes, people can disagree – but the Soldier quests are quite ok, you just kill a little bit more stuff than usual, but the Settler quests really end up costing time. And again the challenges (especially pickup) that start when you just made a little plan to clear out that camp. We’ve taken to taking turns on those, so one is grabbing everything, the other is killing mobs in the way – but it’s just ok, not really amazing.
But! … the game is still fun, although that raid attunement stuff Syl posted about did not sound fun at all… Basically I hated the Karazhan attunement back in TBC already and this sounds like a lot more work… but at least I haven’t yet decided if I will raid at all. Que sera, sera.

New WildStar Library/Addon: NogaCharLib/NogaCharExport

By / / Leave a Comment / WildStar /

So yeah, didn’t play much today but dug a bit deeper on the Addon development front and this is the outcome:

This is how would use the Library in your own addon:

local NogaCharLib = _G["NogaCharLib"]
local currency = NogaCharLib:GetCurrency()
local base = NogaCharLib:GetBaseStats()
local misc = NogaCharLib:GetMiscStats()
local all = NogaCharLib:GetAll()

Whereas the Addon has just one SlashCommand, namely /nogacharexport, which opens a window to copy your character data as JSON. The README in the aforementioned GitHub repo has example output.
nogacharexport