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Game Reviewer for MMOSite, hoping one day soon to pursue game reviewing as a full time career. |
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Visitors Total :
367
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 "MapleStory fans eat your heart out."  Pop Quiz – What's more exciting than spending 4 years playing MapleStory? The answer? Wait for it…wait for it…absolutely everything! I don't care how you slice it, the game's complexity ends at 'Press button to make bad thing die' and it was never enough for me, not even close. Hell, I think I remember arguing with my brother about the game's success once, saying that it wouldn't make it out of beta. Well, 60 million players and 20 bucks later proved that I don't always make the best judgement calls. MapleStory turned out to be the best thing since Oil Deposits and influenced an era of terrible MMO clones that I'm still forced to suffer today. Luckily, and I mean that in ever sense on the word, Dragonica is not just another run-of-mill MapleStory clone, it is the product of what I like to call creative cloning – cloning only the idea of the game and evolving the rest. This is by the way a good thing, as it is how you expand on a genre. Dragonica is essentially a 2.5D Side-scroller, that will see you killing cutesy creatures, completing an assortment of quests, and grinding hours of your life away. As I
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 "Quick question, does anyone here actually like Tennis?"  For everyone offended by the question above, don't be. I wasn't making a joke at the expense of you're unnatural enjoyment for boring sports, I was asking in complete legitimacy, as in order for me to start playing Gold Slam again, I'm going to need to ask you a few questions. Actually, thinking on it more I don't even know if that would do any good. The reality is that even if you were a Tennis junky, and you did know the difference between a Slice, Splice, Volley, Backhand Lob, and mid air loop-de-loop you would undoubtedly still have a rough time getting the hang of Gold Slam. The reason for this boils down to two things, the Tutorial and the Controls. Now I've been told recently that my long-winded intro's can be a bit much to handle, so lets do things differently for a change and jump right into it. Half-Asian, Non-English speaking Tennis Coach says what? Put simply, the Tutorial in Gold Slam is a nightmare. The layout is very simple, your Tennis Coach will give you 5 simple tasks, and once you've completed them you'll be ready to take on the world at the Tennis Championships. The catch is that you're co
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 "I know graphics don't make the game…but give me a break!"  Calm down, take a deep breath and count to ten. There, isn't that better? Now I know that Graphics shouldn't have anything to do with how enjoyable a game is to play and all that, but in this case I think they do. Now don't get angry again - just listen for a moment, and maybe I can show you a different perspective. As a developer you have the ability to choose whichever graphics scheme you would like. Some developers try to push the envelope and use cutting edge graphics to provide incredible eye-candy… and to secretly draw you away from how horrible the gameplay is (NeoSteam springs to mind here). Others deliberately use drawn or cartoon style graphics to lower the system requirements (Think World of Warcraft, or Bots). Then, you have the large variety of games like Ultima Online, Ragnarok Online and Runescape that deliberately use a dated graphics style, and subsequently make a hugely successful game by implementing fantastic gameplay. My focus here is on the latter, as I firmly believe that it is time we moved on. Take Ragnarok for example, these graphics were hugely dated… even when the
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 "The lost city of Atlantis is still lost - will you be the one to find it?"  Turn based battle – my favourite style of battle, has been on the decline for a few years now. In reality it hasn't really been the popular choice since the days of the SNES, but some games still employed the system and in most cases successfully. Take the juggernaught Final Fantasy Series, who until recently have always used an imaginative turn-based battle system, and thanks to it has retained a loyal fan base for over 20 years. This was up until FFXII (Final Fantasy 12); in FFXII they decided to change the fighting system from turn based to a new kind of action system. For some, this was a refreshing new look at a perhaps dated system, for others like myself this prevented them from playing the game for much more than a few days. At the time I was devastated, I never expected the FF series to change from turn-based battles, in every addition to the series they changed characters, magic's, worlds, styles and systems, but they never changed the from turn based battles. Why now? Well, eventually I found that a proper turn-based system just wasn't good enough anymore and they wanted somethi
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 “Wingardiam Levio….wait a second…this isn’t Harry Potter!”  Anyone who has read the Harry Potter books, seen the movies or played the games should get my little funny in the top line there, and anyone who hasn’t shouldn’t be reading this, they should be reading or watching Harry Potter! For those of you who have experienced the phenomenon that is Harry Potter, you are about to have one of two very different feelings, you will either squeal like a school girl as you realise that Harry Potter Online is finally here (I‘ve always had a rather girly voice…), or you are going to be furious that someone has ripped of the brilliant works of J.K Rowling in hopes to leech some of her profits. Originally, I was the latter, because KingsIsle Entertainment really have gone out of their way to make Wizard 101 as similar to Harry Potter as legally possible. You start out as a child Wizard who has recently been accepted into Ravenwood School of Magic, and you begin the game by learning how to duel like a Wizard. Soon after you are introduced to your various teachers and settled into the school. This is exactly how I would expect Harry Potter O
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 “Where’s the screaming? There’s supposed to be screaming!”  I don’t usually like to start a review off on a bad note, it sets the wrong mood and promotes negative thinking. When I write a review I want you to read it and be neutral, I want you to get exited about the good aspects, and annoyed about the bad, but I don’t want you to carry a negative beginning throughout the entire read just because that’s the vibe you had when you started. With Requiem, I’m going to be making an exception. I’m going to start on a negative note because this particular note, changes the entire game: This is not a Survival Horror MMO. It’s not even a Horror MMO, or any variation at all. Yes, there are some gory animations, the Havok engine provides some nice Floppy Doll animations and blood splatter, there’s even a few mildly scary locations and features, but none of them come even close to making this game Horror. Let me explain this a little better, the key to unlocking a good Horror game comes down to one thing: scaring your audience silly, and from my experience the best way to accomplish this is through good storytelling. You need to s
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I've noticed lately, and you may have too, that over the last couple of years F2P (Free to Play) games have begun to evolve. It wasn't long ago that the mere mention of a game with no cost or monthly fee would have people literally running in fear, and with good reason too because let's face it, F2P games had never really been all that good. But how could they be? These games receive no income whatsoever, how are they supposed compete with games like World of Warcraft that boast annual profits in the billions? Well, nowadays they are competing; by using in game advertising and charging real money for in-game items these games are turning a very large profit, without initially charging the player at all. Now, they have begun to evolve again, higher quality game developers have begun to notice that this  method of development can in some cases turn an even higher profit than games that require purchase, and as such higher quality F2P games are on the rise. Warrior Epic is one of these games. Developed by Possibility Space, Warrior Epic is not only taking huge steps in a graphical sense, but they are also adding completely new features never before seen in the MM
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<-- Like it? Digg it! “Lineage 2 meets World of Warcraft”  Everyone has their favourite games, the ones that you play for months at a time. When your playing them, you rarely want to play anything else. They have the best memories, the best groups, the best weapons, and you tell all of your friends to come and play with you because they clearly don’t know what their missing out on. For me, these games were Lineage 2, and World of Warcraft. Discovering shortly after logging into Rohan that it was the perfect mix of both of these games, I started to feel that favourite game urge rising once again. Logging into Rohan for the first time was an interesting experience, mainly due to it’s massive popularity the servers crashed seconds after opening. With hundreds of thousands of people trying to log in at once it was a very difficult start. Fortunately it wasn’t long until the admins had added a new sever and most of us were able to log in successfully. There were some lag issues, and the servers crashed occasionally, but a few hours later everything had stabilised and it was time to play. Naturally, the first thing to do was to choose a class, thankfully Roh
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 "Move over Monopoly, Richman Online is here!"  Yes, the first thing you will undoubtedly notice when you start playing Richman Online is that it is incredibly similar to Monopoly, well; it would be if Monopoly had landmines and nuclear warfare. After logging in and listening to some of the catchiest tunes in any MMO to date, you'll first be asked to complete the tutorial. Fortunately its brilliant, covering a vast majority of the game without boring you to tears. They've taken the 'learn by doing' approach, setting up a game with the rules specific to what they were trying to teach you, and then letting you battle it out with an NPC under those conditions. By the end of it you always have a full understanding of what they were trying to teach. After completing the tutorial you should be level 4, and able to join the main room, allowing you to play against other people. I found that after  sitting in the lobby for only a few seconds I was invited to my first game…it didn't go so well. I honestly had no idea of the rules outside of the tutorial, so naturally when my first turn came along and I saw 3 other players all neatly lined up next to each other I went with
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  I've mentioned previously that I find it hard to beat the feeling of logging into a new game. There's an uncertainty in the air, most of the time I don't really know too much about what I'm going to be playing, and I'm a sucker for suspense. If I had to list out all of possible things that can happen in that first minute, a cinematic opening would be right at the top. So after lighting that 'new game ciggie', leaning back in my favorite chair and logging into NeoSteam for the first time, finding a beautiful cinematic waiting for me was so much more than a pleasant surprise, it was pure magic. Having had such a pleasant first few minutes in NeoSteam, it saddens me greatly to say that before I had even finished that cigarette, I encountered several massive disappointments. The first of which is language translation; from my experience every game seems to have their own level of translation ranging somewhere from  perfect English, to Engrish. From this point forward 'NeoSteam' is now the new lowest rank on the translation ladder, Engrish would almost be pleasant compared to most of the text here, and although for many people this isn't really a big issue for someone like mysel
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