So Scarlet Blade is the American version of Queen’s Blade. It is an MMO with only female characters and primarily relies on sex appeal. Armor merely changes the type of skimpy clothes that your character is wearing. It does not even try to hide this fact and try to profit off of it as well. They are also selling some founder pack stuff with limited time items.

Story:

The story starts off with the character’s group being under attack and communications are offline. You (something called an Arkana, which seems to be despised by some people as well) have to restore it and start solving some sort of mystery behind everything. It is confusing when the NPCs all communicate to you through some sort of wireless system rather than in person, but it makes sense considering the level of technology available. The good thing is that there is a little voice acting at least so it is not as boring as other games.

Gameplay:

I am going to have to state something right away. I REALLY hate the login

So recently, EA and their Maxis branch released the new SimCity for PC. The catch was that this was online only as a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to deal with the copyright infringement. Unfortunately, when you make a game online only, you need to have servers that can handle the number of players. This means that servers have to be prepared ahead of time before launch so that everyone can log on once the game is officially released. As we have seen with other games, including MMOs, this never happens. A game's population tends to peak during the first few months and it declines until the death of a game with the rare spikes that occur when expansion packs are released.

Over the years, EA has experimented with numerous forms of DRM. The earliest form was probably CD keys that restricted people to only 1 allowed online at any given time so that people could not share keys. They used online authenciation to try to curb that, but some people just disconnected their Internet

Crowd funding is the act of people pooling their resources (money in this game) to finance a project. Kickstarter has become famous for this concept and what they do is take a portion of the money that you earn through their site as a fee to keep themselves going. Unfortunately, many projects do not reach their goals, but this can be used as a way to determine interest in a concept. However, there is fear that this system is abused and money is not used for the intended purpose, such as developing a game. Some of the sites have taken it upon themselves to force the people who receive the money for the project to either complete the project or return all of the money.

The most notable instance of crowd funding has to be Double Fine Adventure, which raised nearly $3.5 million. Other companies have also turned to crowd funding to try to create new video games. They rely on their name to try to produce sequels to games that have long since been forgotten. These examples include dead fran

With the massive overhaul of League of Legends since the Pre-Season 3 patch, I figured it was time that League of Legends was due for an update. However, the Season 3 patch revealed that they were overhauling the ranking system as well so I decided to wait for that before I wrote about the game again. This is a re-review of the game as of 2/10/13.

Story:

N/A - Wars are bad, new Fields of Justice system are used to settle the fights instead. Read up on it if you want, but no one cares and storytelling was abandoned long for just character lore.

Graphics:

Since I last reviewed the game, the maps have been reworked to be higher in detail along with many character models. The previous problem of some champions being completely out of place when standing next to others is slowly being fixed, but they have a long way to go for many of them. The process is slow, but they are gradually getting around to it with one every few months. Hopefully with the release of new champions cut back, th

I have a 2nd article in the works about DLC and greed again. I probably won't get around to it just yet.

Response to these 2 articles:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/30/1183287/-U-S-Senator-Lamar-Alexander-Guns-don-t-kill-people-video-games-do

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Video-games-drawn-into-violence-debate-4219013.php#page-1

So after Sandy Hook, you think they would finally have some common sense to say place heavy restrictions on firearms and access to firearms. Apparently, this is not a "viable solution" because it goes against the Second Amendment, which has now been interpreted as the right to bear arms rather than say the right to have an organized and trained militia. Every proposal to fix this has been shot down by saying that it won't work 100% of the time. Unfortunately, this is true of ALL laws, but it is the best solution for now and should be implemented. Instead, the scapegoating has begun and gun enthusiasts are using this opportunity to reignite the ar

Back in the day, many buy to play (B2P) and pay to play (P2P) MMOs started off with you having to buy the game and it would come with a subscription for a few months. Afterwards, you would have to pay monthly to continue playing. However, as time went on, free to play (F2P) games began to take over. Nowadays, the F2P market has taken over and P2P is a dying model.

One thing that F2P games have shown us is that you do not need to make people buy anything for them to get started. The only problem is the huge bandwidth costs that comes with people downloading a multi GB game client and patches just to be able to play the game. All you need is a high speed connection, which anyone who plays an MMO should have in the first place. Some game installers are over 4 GB and is much bigger than that once it is actually installed. The installer will also need to be periodically updated to include the newest patches and to reduce the patching time of new players. Many game

So I have finally gotten around to playing Diablo 3. I know it came out a while ago, but I like the dungeon crawler genre of MMOs.

EDIT: I've made some changes to the review since I finished Inferno with my friend. Now I'm working on obtaining better gear so I can do the stuff that requires Monster Power on Inferno.

Story:

So 20 years ago, Diablo 2 happened. Some guy falls from the sky and you have to help him find his sword so you and your friends can work together to defeat the remaining evils. Throughout the game, you work to defeat the remaining evils of Belial, Lord of Lies and Azmodan, Lord of Sins. However, things are not as easy as it seems because in the world of Diablo, everyone is an asshole with their own agenda.

Graphics:

For a game that came out in 2012, the graphics are not impressive. There are many games with far better graphics. However, it tries to retain some of the old visual styling of Diablo with a higher end graphics. The result is what we see in Di

I am an advocate of what are called milestone events. This is where players on the server or entire game work together to achieve a certain collective goal that can be measured numerically. It can be collect a certain number of an item or kill a certain number of monsters. As each milestone goal is achieved, a reward is granted to the entire server in the form of either a temporary boost to the entire server or a promotional item that is granted to everyone. Sometimes they give promotional items that are like a preview for the next area to participants or people who place in a ranking. The difference is that the items are eventually accessible to everyone later on without much difficulty.

I am however, disappointed by ranking based events that grant rewards based on your ranking in the overall system. In the short run, this seems like a decent reward and it is better if everyone has a fair start. However, there are problems when things like the item mall can be used to give yourself

https://www.examiner.com/article/fox-news-blames-sandy-hook-shootings-on-videogames

http://gamepolitics.com/2012/12/15/fox-news-tries-tie-tv-facebook-and-gaming-ct-tragedy#.UM5HcW88B8F

http://kotaku.com/5968569/fox-news-links-connecticut-shooting-to-violent-video-games

http://www.destructoid.com/mass-effect-and-more-attacked-over-school-shooting-240657.phtml

It feels like not too long ago that we have had this sort of incident. Somehow, it seems more and more like the news does not bother to confirm their information anymore. They just start making assumptions and go with it rather than bother to thoroughly check their sources and information before they do things like this. The target this time was Mass Effect.

To start things off, they got the name of the person who committed the crime wrong. They got his brother instead who was at the time on his Facebook telling people that it was not him and that it was his brother. So the first thing they do is to look over the person's inter

So I have continued my search for a better action MMORPG after Rusty Hearts and their level 50 patch introduced some nasty imbalancing problems. I decided to turn to OGPlanet's Zone 4, and that was a big mistake.

Story:

The story of the game is about the titular Zone 4. It is a place where people fight it out to be the best, but it has problems. Now, you must make your way to Zone 4 by fighting your way through it. Other than that, you just completing random tasks that are given to you by the NPCs.

Graphics:

The graphics are not impressive by today's standards, but it still has a good overall feel. I really like the cartoonish style that is used for the backgrounds. The characters are also fairly decent. The only problem is that customization items are extremely rare with some of it being restricted to item mall. The character animations are pretty good though. There are different fighting styles and the different animations for them makes it seem very impressive overall. T