World of Tanks Review

Today I have another guest post for you. This one comes in from Penny Cooper and is a review of the MMO blast-em-up "World of Tanks". Take it away, Penny:


Game: World of Tanks
Publisher: Wargaming.net
Type: Team based MMO
Score: 7/10

When video game makers release a game for free-to-play, many assume it not of the best quality. But World of Tanks breaks that notion and exuberates a grandeur that you are unlikely to have expected of a free game! What makes World of Tanks a class apart from other MMOs is its graphics. A straight “A” for the effort the makers have put in designing the tanks and the maps. World of Tanks can surprise you, if you play it without any expectations in mind.

An Introduction to the game

World of Tanks is a game developed by Wargaming.net, a Russian game studio. It is a massively multiplayer online game which is set up in the period of World War II. The tanks of Germany, the US and the Soviet Union are designed accurately keeping in mind the actual war tanks of that period.

Gameplay

It is a First person shooter game where instead of being a human shooter, you will be a tank! This might seem funny for someone who has never heard of this game, but once you start playing, it keeps you hooked. There are more than 100 tanks to choose from and up to 60 players can be involved per battle. There are two teams, each consisting of a maximum of 30 players. The first mode is a deathmatch, where each team is assigned a player randomly. The eventual rounds are the clan and flag deathmatches, where the player has to play hard to fit in the team he/she likes.

As a player, you have to find enemy tanks and destroy them. It surprisingly helps in busting stress but then again, the experience depends on the rest of the players too.

The Mass Effect philosophical corner: Was the Genophage okay?

While I'm chewing my way through Mass Effect 3, which has both its ups and downs, I've run into several interesting moral dilemmas that I've started to think about.
I've decided to make of couple of ultra nerdy posts, where I want to talk about issues in the Mass Effect universe their surrounding issues.

The first Mass Effect subject that I'd like to discuss is the Genophage.
The Genophage is a biological weapon that was developed by the Salarians during the Krogan Rebellion wars, which was a decades long war between the Krogan and the Council races. The Krogan Rebellion was a result of massive Krogan expansion, which eventually started to transgress onto other Council races planets. The rebellion was looking to end up in the Krogans' favor until the Genophage was deployed and started to thin their ranks.

Krogans: They like killing stuff

The Genophage affects the entire Krogan species and leaves most of the Krogan females infertile, resulting in the slow and steady decline of the population of the species due to extremely low birth rates.

First of all let's start off by establishing that deploying a biological weapon against an entire species that is designed to produce infertility is clearly a horrible thing to do.
The Genophage is effectively a weapon that attacks the Krogan population regardless of whether they are men, women or children and no matter if they are a soldier or a civilian.
So the arguments for accepting the use of this weapon would have to extraordinarily strong!

I think that the arguments for using the Genophage against the Krogans can be boiled down to three:


1) The Krogans were moved out of their "natural environment" and were not yet at a point where they were ready to start traveling between the stars. 

The Krogans were originally not a space faring species.
They lived on their native world of Tuchanka where they spent their time fighting among themselves. Indeed their infighting was so fierce that they turned the planet into a radioactive wasteland by deploying nuclear weapons.

The Krogans did not posses advanced space technology, on account of Krogan scientists being too busy finding new ways of blowing their fellows into small pieces. But this all changed when the Salarians helped the Krogans off Tuchanka and gave them access to advanced technology.

Mass Effect 3 Impressions - A mixed bag of massed effects

I've spent the last few days trying to save the galaxy from the Reapers in Mass Effect 3, clocking up about 20 hours of dialogue wheeling and Cerberus blasting.
I'm still a little ambivalent about my feelings of Mass Effect 3, but from a shaky start I'm now really warming up to the game and find myself itching to get back in the thick of Reaper busting.

As you may know from my previous article about the things that I was looking forward to seeing in Mass Effect 3, I'm a huge Mass Effect fan. The Mass Effect games are some of the very few RPG's where I actually go out of my way to clear all side content instead of just barreling straight through the main story.
I really love the fiction of the universe and the characters feel excellently realized, in no small part due to the great voice acting and cinematic camera work during dialogue.

Shoot Brutes in the face for maximum chance of sending them into a murderous rage

Naturally I was therefore extremely excited to finally getting to play the final installment in the ME trilogy.
The demo, which I've previously given my impressions on, reminded me about how much I love these games, so as soon as I got my hands on the game I wasted no time importing my Shepard and getting down to business.

But after the first couple of hours with ME3 I started to get more than a little worried about BioWare's efforts.
Much of the first hours of the game was spent listening to voice work that felt flat and badly timed, with lines often being delivered without any sense of appropriate emotional intonation and responses sometimes coming after several seconds of awkward silence.
Furthermore it seemed that whoever was in charge of lip syncing the game is a heavy drinker or a tragic stroke victim, with dialogue several times coming out of characters' mouths in ways that made it look like they were in some kind of redubbed B-movie.

Finally, while the initial part of ME3 does a good job of setting the scene and showing you some cool looking set pieces, I felt that I was being lead down straight corridors with no room to explore or choose my own approach.

"Oh Mass Effect 3!" I cried to no one in particular "What have they done to you?! You were supposed to be a seductive Asari, beautiful and perfect, but you look more like a scarred up Krogan".