The Darkness 2 - The Shining Light of Over-the-top shooters?

It's time for another guest post. This time coming in from Dani, who has jutted down his thoughts on the latest entry in the "FPS with crazy snake/eel arms" genre (it's a pretty narrow genre, I'll admit).
Take it away, Dani:

The first Darkness game was an enjoyable over-the-top shooter with a strong focus on gameplay as opposed to an engrossing plot or realistic graphics. It told the story of Jackie Estacado, a young mafia hitman involved in an attempted assassination, hiding in a cemetery when an ancient demonic force called the Darkness contacts him and kills his assailants.

The game then becomes a fairly standard first person shooter with the added powers of The Darkness, which form tendrils at your side. Throughout the course of the game, Jackie also visits the otherworld to further develop the plot and sees his powers grow. One of the strongest gameplay features allow for dual-wielding of weapons whilst also using the Darkness powers, in a mechanic unofficially called ‘quad-wielding’.

Despite favourable reviews hovering around the 7.5-8 region, The Darkness was never deemed that much of a hit; however has sold a million copies and warranted enough demand for a sequel.

The Darkness 2, one of the latest game releases, continues the story of Jackie Estacado who has risen to the top rank of the mafia and now wants rid of the Darkness. I won’t explain the full details of the plot; however it is safe to say that they have really upped the stakes in the storytelling department.

Featuring an updatable ability tree that can be progressed with by collecting the hearts of the victims, as well as a stronger focus on the Darkness, particularly the Darkling. This feature allows Jackie to kill enemies from greater distances, interact with environments and access otherwise unreachable areas and paths.

A clear improvement over the original, the Darkness 2 has really found its feet and established it’s placed in the shooter genre; however unfortunately still suffers from a relatively short single-player campaign and continued issues in multiplayer (which was also one of the biggest complaints of the original).

Suspend your beliefs, crank up the sound system and immerse yourself in the comic-book world of Jackie Estacado – however, if you’re after another Modern Warfare or Battlefield-style playstation 3 games, you’re looking in the wrong place. For one of the best gameplay experiences of the year, as well as a ludicrous yet enjoyable story, packaged in an unconventional yet satisfying game, you can’t go far wrong with the Darkness 2.

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"Jagged Alliance - Back in Action" Demo Impressions - Casuals need not apply

Hey, remember back in the days when video games were cruel and unforgiving bastards that would happily destroy your pre-pubescent face with a sadistic level of difficulty?
The days where we got stuff like the "kicking-sand-in-your-eyes"-hard X-COM, which can still kick my ass and crush my spirit to this day.

Would you like to relive those times of "real challenges" and once again spend your time with a game that wants nothing more than to break your will to live? Well, then you're in for a treat with "Jagged Alliance - Back in Action"!

"I will devour your soul and make you cry tears of blood!"

Back in Action follows in the footsteps of the original "Jagged Alliance" from 1994 and the sequel from 2004.
You control a team of mercenaries through a series of missions in your attempt to overthrow the ruthless dictator of the made up country "Arulco".
Missions play out from an isometric 3D overhead view, where you can give orders to your men in real time.
Back in Action also allows you to pause the game and set up a chain of orders for your men to execute, kind of like Dragon Age only more advanced.

Controlling your men with the utmost of military precision is key in Back in Action demo, as the enemies in the demo mission are absolutely lethal and will also summon their equally lethal friends as soon as they catch sight of your merc mug.
I say "military precision", but perhaps it would be more accurate to say it requires completely anal attention to detail.
Now granted, I am not the most hardcore of tactical game players, but I've spent my fair share of time with stuff like the old X-COM games and the "Commandos", which are not exactly a walk in the park. But I found myself being constantly blown to small mercenary giblets in this demo, even when I tried very hard to be smart about my positioning and took down my targets carefully.

More than 50.000 Hyperspace travelers serviced!

It seems like only yesterday that I set all engines to ludicrous speed and launched Light Speed Gaming, but it's actually been almost five months.

Today I'm happy to be able to say that the blog has now been viewed more than 50.000 thousand times, or about 10.000 views per month on average!
When I initially started up Light Speed Gaming I had absolutely zero blogging experience and really had no idea if I would be able to get anyone at all to spend time reading my inane ramblings. I'm pretty blown away by how many people actually took time to stop by and waste a bit of their day here.

A big thank you to everyone that has read my posts! I hope that you're enjoying your time here and, as always, I'll be more than happy to receive any feedback you have regarding the site.

Here are a few fun facts about Light Speed Gaming after the first five months:


-The average time spent on the site by a reader is 59 seconds 


-Returning visitors make up about 10% of the traffic

-The most popular post, 5 Things I can't wait to see in Mass Effect 3, has had almost 2.600 views

Since the start of the blog I've had to ease off a bit on my ambition to deliver a new post every single day, and I've "cheated" a bit on some days and just posted a trailer that caught my eye.

I've also noted that writing about your hobby is a lot more hard work than you might think, and you got to be careful about it unless you want to ruin the enjoyment of spending time with it!

I can see that the daily traffic numbers are slowly increasing, so I'm sure that the 100k views mark will be reached a lot faster than 50k. Not that more traffic in itself means all that much, but it's nice to know that the stuff you spend many hours a week on creating actually gets viewed by an audience.

After all, I have a blog because I want people to see and respond to my work, otherwise I would have started a diary!

If I can make a small request to you as readers, it would be two things:

1) If you spend a minute here reading my posts, I would be incredibly grateful if you would use an extra 10 seconds to leave a comment. Comments are the best way for me to know if you like and/or are finding my writings useful. As a writer there is nothing better than reader feedback.Somewhat more commercial in nature. 

2) You may have noticed that I'm running a few ads on the site. 

Light Speed Gaming is not intended in any way to be a big income source for me, but I do spend a lot of time on the site every day, either creating posts or simply promoting the site or working behind the scene. I have also had a couple of giveaways that have come out of my own pocket, so it would be nice if the site could at least pay for itself. 

Therefore it would be much appreciated if you used the ads, whenever they seem interesting to you. I'm not asking you to just click away on every ad you see, but if you're in the market for a gaming mouse and you just happen to see an ad for one here on the sight, then why not take a second and check it out?

Again, I'd like to offer a big and sincere "Thank you" to everyone that has dropped by Light Speed Gaming.

Rest assured that I will work continuously on improving the site! 

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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Review Round Up

A little while back I played through the Demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning both on Xbox and on the PC. I was somewhat disappointed by the experience, but not enough to completely destroy my anticipation.
Therefore I have been eagerly awaiting the reviews of the full game to try to get an impression of how the full game holds up.

"It gives a great review score or it gets the club again."

The reviews are starting to flow in now and it looks like my lukewarm reaction to the demo is more or less echoed in the reviewers articles:

Gamespot Review: 7.5 / 10

Giant Bomb Review: 4 / 5

IGN Review: 9 / 10

Edge Review: 6 / 10

The general impression seems to be that there are some very great and enjoyable elements in Reckoning, most notably the free flowing combat system and the ability to spec out your character however you want to play the game, but there are also some serious flaws with the game, like an over abundance of uninteresting quests and lack of a strong narrative.

I'm still waiting to get my hands on a retail copy of Reckoning, but from the reviews that I've seen so far it will probably be a game that manages to keep me entertained until the release of Mass Effect 3, but without leaving a lasting impression.



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Feeling Frustrated From Franchise Fatigue

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing when it comes to your favorite games? With great games such as Assassin's Creed or Uncharted, should we as gamers not simply be overjoyed that developers are cranking out new installments of a consistently high level at regular intervals?

Well no, for me at least I've reached the point of "Franchise Fatigue". I'm getting tired of watching the same old circus horse being paraded around the ring, even if the horse gets a new fancy headdress every time, and even if it *is* very impressive for a horse to be able to jump backwards through a flaming metal ring while reciting Edgar Allan Poe.

"No no, this is completely different from Brotherhood.
Look, you have a *hook* in this one! Madness!"

I think the realization struck me a few days ago as I was starting up Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
Assassin's Creed 2 was probably one of my favorite games of 2009 and I also liked Brotherhood a whole lot. But after just a few hours of Revelations I was just not enjoying the game at all. The story didn't grab me and the gameplay felt decidedly stale.
I realized that it was not really the game itself that was at fault. Assassin's Creed: Revelations is a high quality game that, at least in my opinion, is as good of a game as its two predecessors.
The problem is that I've already played this game twice before. Sure, I'll get to visit a new city and I'll get to add a couple of new gadgets to my already terribly overburdened Assassin, but it's very much the same game that I played last year.

I had a similar feeling with Uncharted 3 and Batman: Arkham City. I recognize that both of these games are, objectively speaking, very well put together and represent some of the highest quality gaming experiences of 2011. But in both cases I felt a horrible sense of deja-vu when I played them, to the point that I lost interest and gave up on finishing either one of them.

Light Speed Gaming Week in Review: January 30

People of Earth, do not be afraid! Though your planet has now concluded another seven complete rotations on its own axis in its continued impression of a cosmological dog chasing its own non-existent tail, be assured that these aforementioned rotational movements have not been wasted by yours truly.

Or to put it in another way; Another week has gone by and it's time to check out what went down here on Light Speed Gaming.

Last week was a bit slow, game releases are a rare beast in the early weeks of the year, and I've been spending some time on non sci-fi and gaming related activities (heresy, I know).

"Disappointed in SWTOR? I find your lack of faith...disturbing"

Nevertheless I did take some time and sit down to write the closest thing I'll be doing to a full review of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Rather than trying to do a full review of SWTOR I decided to write about what I feel are my most important point about the game. The title of the post, "Why Star Wars: The Old Republic is ultimately a disappointment", will probably clue you on to guessing that I'm not altogether impressed by the game that BioWare has put together for us.

Aside from incurring the wrath of Star Wars fanboys I also dared to potentially upset another community of equal devotion, by writing up a review of "Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012".
But unlike my scribbles about SWTOR, this is a much more happy outcome for all involved parties, as I quite enjoyed my time as a card battling Gandalf.

Finally the week was capped off by me staying up too late into the night and subjecting you all to a bit of spontaneous fiction writing in a short bit of writing that I call; The Perils of Space Travel and You.

That's all from me for now. Though the sudden onset of winter is threatening to freeze off several of my favorite body extremities, be assured that more posts will continue to make their way onto the site this week!



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The Perils of Space Travel and You

Translation into realspace is always a somewhat jarring experience at the best of times, but this particular instance makes Jack sick to his stomach despite his many years of space travel.

It's not so much the fact that the mass of your body is being pushed and pulled in ways that make you feel like a human accordion that gets to Jack. Nor is it the acute sense of vertigo, like you are being tossed out from the highest mountain peak imaginable.
These are feelings that Jack know and handles as easily as any normal person might handle a slight breeze in their face or an inconveniently timed rain shower.

No, the sickness in Jack's stomach is a result of this particular jump into the normal realm of physics having missed the contents of Jack's stomach.

The phenomenon of temporary, local space-time distortion, or "the jumpies" as it is commonly known, when returning to slower-than-light travel, is well known to a veteran space traveler like Jack, of course. Small pockets that continue to travel at faster-than-light speed for just a fraction of a second longer than the space around them.
Jack once saw the captains Great Dane caught in such a pocket. That case had ended with the big dog being launched across the bridge of the ship, smashing into a command console with such force that the bridge crew was still finding lumps of fur in their controls to this day.

Fortunately for Jack, this case of the jumpies is a lot more benign than the incident that ended the life of poor "Snuggles".

For a moment Jack is even convinced that he'll be able to fight it off.

A buzz at the door announces a visitor and as the door slides away Jack sees the familiar face of his colleague, Eric. Smiling, Eric takes a step into Jack's quarters and looks at his friend, who is looking unusually concentrated.
"That was a nice smooth jump, eh Jackie boy?", Eric announces.

It is then that Jack makes a critical error of judgement, as he decides to answer Eric. Parting his lips seems to be just the opportunity his stomach had been waiting for. In his mind Jack hears himself saying "Well, I dunno about that, mate.", but all that his ears hear is "W..BWWWAURRGGHHGA!", as a jet of vomit spews from his mouth at a speed so fast that he swears there's a supersonic boom ringing throughout the small room.

The spray hits the opposite wall, narrowly missing Eric's head by mere inches but hitting him all across the face with the force of the recoil.
Eric blinks sheepishly, his mouth opening and closing like a surprised fish that's just been thrown onto the deck of a boat. After a couple of seconds he regains enough cognitive capability to form a single sentence; "I'll...I'll come back later, shall I?".

Jack wipes his mouth with the back of a trembling hand, a passing dry heave making his shoulders convulse.
"...Yeah...A little later, Eric...", Jack manages to gasp. "Fucking space travel...I just hope these folks appreciate the pepperoni pizza..."



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Review of Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012

Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 is, besides being a game with a stupidly long title that includes a year suffix that makes you think of annualized sports franchises, a surprisingly interesting and entertaining video game conversion of the famous card game.

I picked up the PC version of Magic The Gather... the PC version of "DotP" a few weeks back, after I watched a "WTF" episode from Totalbiscuit about it that sparked my interest. The game looked nice and clean, with mechanics that were easy to understand but looked to have a lot of depth and opportunity for strategy and intricate tactics.

Way back when I was a kid in school I dabbled a tiny little bit in playing Magic, but I was never really grabbed by the game due to its lack of loud animated explosions or women getting nekkid.
Since then I have grown older. and my voracious appetite for undressed females and things going "boom" has been bountifully tended to, which means that I am now in a better position to take in the simpler joys of a card battling game.

It may not look as adrenaline fueled as a game of MW3 but when the cards start to fly things get real intense real fast

DotP offers a few different ways to get your card battles on. You can play through three different campaigns, which pit you against different opponents with different decks of cards. As you pummel these troublesome spell slingers into submission you'll gain access to their decks, thus building up your Magic card arsenal.
The campaigns also present a number of "challenge" scenarios, in which you are tasked with winning a match in a single round from a given position. These challenges start off easy enough for even the most dim witted Harry Potter wannabe to win, but soon you'll be ready to snap your magic wand in frustration as the difficulty ramps up and the puzzles get increasingly fiendish.

New Syndicate Trailer - Unlock the power of "Breach Apps"

The Syndicate trailers are coming in hard and fast as we close in on the February 21 release date of this FPS that is a festival of gun violence and pulling the brain chips out of other people's head.

This one sheds even more light on the co-op mode of Syndicate and also goes into further details about the "breach apps", which will let you disarm enemies, heal friends and other handy stuff (maybe jailbreak an Iphone?)

I like the "Dart overlay" feature, even if it does feel like it's been ripped straight from Batman's "detective mode".

The ability to be able to customize your character as you gain levels seems potentially interesting as well.
As a gamer that has long since given up on the ninja reflexes required to be fighting for top spots in FPS battles, I'd be interested in tailoring my character to be able to support my more competent fighting allies from behind the lines.




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Why Star Wars: The Old Republic is ultimately a disappointment

When Star Wars: The Old Republic came out it was probably the most hyped MMO since World of Warcraft.
A massively popular setting, coupled with a developer that is generally regarded as one of the best at creating compelling RPG experiences, helped set some very high expectations for SWTOR. I was certainly extremely excited to finally get a chance to pick up a lightsaber and carve my way through this latest entry in the MMORPG space.

And yet I find myself disappointed with the end result.

You would think that this should make for a pretty awesome video game

It's now been about one and a half months since I first stepped out of my arrival shuttle on Korriban as a Sith Inquisitor. During that time I have conspired and murdered my way through the ranks of the Sith hierarchy, I've made friends with such unlikely allies as a Force eating alien, a cocky pirate and a fallen Jedi apprentice. The galaxy has trembled before my meteoric rise to power and I've even had time to get me some sweet looking robes!

All in all it was a wild roller coaster ride all the way through my story.
Then my story ended and I found that there was no more track in place for my joyride and, with a sheepish expression that would make Wile E. Coyote proud, I was unceremoniously dumped into the harsh realities of infinite repetition of content.

Quick look of Soul Calibur V up on Giant Bomb - A little Ezio in your calibur of souls

I've never been much of a fighting games fan, but for some reason I've always quite enjoyed the Soul Calibur games ever since I played the original on my Dreamcast console way back in the day.

The Soul Calibur games are something of a "black sheep" in the fighting games genre, as far as I understand it. It's generally viewed as being a bit too simplistic and not terribly well balanced, but it's easy for non-fighting games people to pick up and the fights look great, so that's probably why I'm partial to it.
Also the chance to play a dual sword wielding pirate with a demon blade is pretty nifty.

Soul Calibur V is the latest entry in the series and is coming out today in the US, while us eurotrash peeps will have to wait a few days more.

I saw this quick look of the game over on my favorite video game website, Giant Bomb, so check it out if you're in the market for a casual friendly and great looking fighting game:

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Light Speed Gaming week in review: January 23

It's the end of January 2012 and that means that there's now only 11 months until we can all point and laugh at the ancient Mayans, or until we are all wiped off the face of the planet by some terrible apocalyptic event (I'm personally hoping for dinosaurs with lasers strapped to their heads).

But I'm not going to let the relentless approach of doom and hopelessness stop me from going on with my everyday life (otherwise I would never have made it through high school). If you need proof then you need look no further than the fountain of posts that went up on the site during last week:

Pulse Rifles. When you want to show that special someone how much you care.
About filling them with lead.

The week started off with yet more studies of how to earn money in SWTOR.
As I have a degree in economics I am somewhat obsessed with money so I hope you'll forgive that this is turning into a whole post series for me.
The power of the Force is all good and well, but the Force won't buy you a new speeder, you know!

Next up was another entry in my Sci-Fi Do Want series, this time about the pew-pew greatness that is the Pulse Rifle from Aliens. It's a cool weapon that I feel really combines futuristic sci-fi with a gritty vibe that makes the weapon fit so well into the Aliens universe.

Also making an appearance this week was a look into my fractured psyche, as I explained how using a game subscription service has made me enjoy gaming more, by easing my somewhat gaming compulsive mind.

Finally the week went out with a bang (or a fart, would perhaps be more accurate) with an interview with the developers of "Orc Attack", an upcoming beat-em-up game that pits up to 4 players in the role of a group of highly flatulent orcs against the nasty human hordes.

And that was all that I could pull out of the grey fleshy goodie bag that is my brain.
More content is, as always, incoming at light speed, so stay tuned.



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Exclusive interview with developers of Orc Attack

"Orc Attack" is a game in the vein of Castle Crashers, which lets up to 4 players take the role of a band of gassy Orcs and beat their way through over 20 levels of human bashing goodness. I've had a talk with Igor Rodinski from "Casual Brothers", developers of this upcoming beat- and fart-em-up Orc Attack, which is looking to satisfy all your filthy human killing needs.

Here's a gameplay demo showing the game in action:

Now on to the interview.

Q: Firstly I’d like to ask you to give us a short introduction to Orc Attack. What’s the essence of the game?

A: The essence is, above all, fun, both alone or even better, with your friends.
The story has its fair share of protest against the destruction of the environment. The Orcs use to live wild and free in their homeland, until the humans arrive with their evil machines to exploit the natural resources to the exhaustion, bringing pollution to the land, water and air, and making the Orcs fell terribly sick, suffering severe gastric disorders that will result in extreme flatulence.

Q: The beat-em-up genre has had somewhat of a revival in recent years, especially after the release of Castle Crashers. Can you tell us a little about what your inspiration for Orc Attack has been and how Orc Attack stands out from other beat-em-ups?

A: We can’t deny we love Castle Crashers and that we found some inspiration in it. In fact, we were pretending to catch the spirit of 2D beat’em up classics, bringing them to 3D, something that no one done before, and we think we succeeded thanks to our innovative camera, for Orc Attack stands out from others beat-em ups firstly for been in 3D and for its innovative camera, focusing the action with all four players always on screen sharing the same view.
Secondly, the mass combat allow up to 50 enemies on screen, so the battles looks really spectacular. Of course, there is the difference that in this game you play Orcs against evil human, and, naturally, the use of gases, as farts and burps, to fight the enemies producing explosions and other deadly effects, is also a stand up.

How a game renting service is making me a much more relaxed gamer

It might seem ironic to a lot of people that you can get stressed out about your hobby and especially a hobby like video gaming. Playing video games should be all about punching out from your everyday obligations and just relaxing, but that's not always the feelings that I associate with my favorite pastime.

You see, I am what you may consider to be something of a fanatic when it comes to trying out all the latest and greatest games. Whenever I start hearing people rave about the greatness of a game I get a terrible itch to go and check it out, to the point where I almost feel that I *have* to try the game in order to be a "real" gamer.
It's a big part of why I know all the stuff that I know about games and it's a trait that comes in very useful when you're running a blog about video games.
But it's also somewhat of a curse that can make me feel guilty about not having played Assassin's Creed Revelations yet, or drive me to play Rayman: Origins even though I really don't care at all for 2D platformers.
It's the kind of drive that really has no place in a hobby that is just there to waste away some excess hours of my life in an entertaining fashion.

But it is part of my personality and I guess if that is as quirky as I get, then I should consider myself lucky. At least I don't have some kind of debilitating OCD condition (12345), OCD condition (12345).

Sci-Fi Do Want: The Pulse Rifle from Aliens

There's a wonderful aesthetic to the "Alien" movies that's difficult to describe. It's a grimy universe with extremely advanced technology that somehow looks both sophisticated and simple at the same time.

This is a design paradigm that the Pulse Rifle encapsulates perfectly, with it's bulky shape and digital ammo readout it looks futuristic and potent, but also like something that you would be able to mend in the field without being a tech expert.

I'm not sure that the side of the gun is the best place to put the ammo readout, guys

When the Pulse Rifle is fired it spews out a huge muzzle flare, but rather than sounding like the pounding hooves of the horsemen of the apocalypse, it has a much more subtle noise that sounds more like some sort of electric power tool than a deadly assault rifle.
This is another example of how the Pulse Rifle combines the bulky and brutal and the sci-fi into something that is the best of both worlds.

Throughout the Aliens movies we get to see that the Pulse Rifle is quite up to the job of killing one of those slimy double-mouthed wall crawlers, but it requires several bursts of concentrated fire to take one of them down, and this makes the weapon feel potent but somewhat insufficient at the same time.
Sure, you can go hunting Aliens with a Pulse Rifle, but you better be quick and accurate or you will very quickly find yourself with an empty gun and a pissed off acid dripping Alien that's about to suck your juicy face meat off your skull.

4 Ways to make more money on the GTN in SWTOR

Making money in Star Wars: The Old Republic can be hard work. So you'll want all the help you can get to make credits as easily as possible in SWTOR so you can focus on the fun stuff like blasting people or slicing them into neat little cubes with your lightsaber.

I've previously written about the 4 steps I used to get 100k in SWTOR by level 25 and that's probably a good starting point if you've just come in fresh off the shuttle and need to make your first credits.

I've also talked about the 3 ways that you can make money off the GTN, which is the "auction house" system of SWTOR, and that's going to be my jumping off point for this post, so if you haven't already read this post then I recommend that you give it a quick read.

I'm going to take a little time and share a few pointers as to how you can improve "playing" the GTN. By "playing" I mean the act of buying and re-selling items from the GTN without adding value to the items.
In this post I'm only looking at crafting materials as these items are the easiest to "play" the GTN with.

I've used these steps for about a week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes every day, and so far my profit is about 400k credits.

Thanks to these tips I can now call myself a bona fide SWTOR credit millionaire

Here are my 4 basic tips to playing the GTN:

Light Speed Gaming week in review: January 16

January marches on relentlessly with its cold, grey and generally soul crushing dreariness.
Or maybe that's just how January is for me?

In any event, the cold weather and the financial Christmas hangovers shall not stop me from bringing you more content right here on Light Speed Gaming!

Glowing purple wrist swords aside, the Reckoning demo was a big letdown for me

Last week kicked off with the second chapter in my personal SWTOR gaming journal. In this installment I traveled through the Empire capital world of Dromund Kaas and discovered the continued joys of tomb raiding.

I also spent a few good hours of the week in the company of the demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and I took some time to share my impressions of the demo.
Initially I was pretty disappointed after playing through the demo on Xbox, but after also playing the demo again on PC I found it to be a significantly better experience. I'm still very much on the fence about the game but I'm crossing my fingers that the developers will tweak and bang away on it right up until the time it ships.

Another game that the developers are apparently still tweaking and banging away on is Diablo 3. This week Blizzard shared with us that they are still making large changes to game mechanics, which makes it seem extremely unlikely that we'll be seeing Diablo 3 anytime soon... Baaaaaaaah!

Finally I turned the brass crank on my steam powered typewriter and cranked out a book review of the steampunk novel "Boneshaker".
The book was an interesting trip into a corner of science fiction that I have very little experience with, and despite some concerns that I had with it, I found it to be an entertaining read all in all.

So that's what was on the table of sci-fi and gaming goodness last week.
I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready for another healthy helping of blog ramblings from your favorite purveyor of video games and science fiction related scribbles!



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Sneak preview of what's coming in The Old Republic

BioWare released this short video Friday to let us in on what we can look forward to in SWTOR:

No huge surprises really and not much in terms of concrete information.

I guess the few new bits of data that we can take away is that guild banks will be the first new guild feature that we'll see and that this "Rise of the Rhakghoul" storyline is going to take place across two content patches.
Oh, and also UI customization which I'm sure a lot of people will be very happy about.

Personally I would have liked some more information about the legacy system aside from "we'll do stuff with it!".



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Book Review: Boneshaker - Steampunk with a side order of Zombie

A few weeks ago I asked on my Twitter stream what sci-fi book I should read next.
I had just come off the Warhammer 40k book Savage Scars, which I did not much care for at all. So I was in the mood for a real palette cleanser that was completely different from the 40k universe.

Twitter user Trin quickly came to the rescue and recommended that I take a gander at Boneshaker, which is a steampunk novel that ups the ante by mixing in a bit of zombies with its world of airships and grinding gears.

I haven't really read much in the way of steampunk before, so this book sounded like just the thing to break up my series of Warhammer 40k disappointments.

Goggles? Gotta be steampunk then, I recon!

It's the late 19th century as the sparks of a civil war began in America, the Russians had their eyes on Alaska and the rumors of large gold deposits hidden in the frozen underground. To mine the gold in these harsh conditions the Russians contracted the brilliant inventor Leviticus Blue to create "The Boneshaker", an incredible mining machine that would be able to drill out the gold in the hostile Alaskan wastes.

But the Boneshaker never got to mine any gold in Alaska, as Leviticus instead drove the machine out from the basement of his home in Seattle and used it to drive straight through the underground vaults of the city banks and steal their money.
After the dust settled it became clear that Blue had not just performed a spectacular bank robbery but had also caused the release of some unknown gas that seeped up from the underground.

Fast forward 16 years later and a huge wall has been erected to seal off the gas from the rest of Seattle. The gas, now nicknamed "Blight" has the unfortunate side effect of not only being deadly, but also reanimating the victims as shambling monsters with a hunger for flesh.

Blizzard apparently still tinkering on Diablo 3

While we did not get a chance to play Diablo 3 in time for the 2011 Holidays there was a wide spread hope/belief that Blizzard was onto the last little bit of tweaking and that the game would be out in early 2012.

Now this post on the official Diablo 3 website makes this seems like a very unlikely prospect indeed.
Apparently Blizzard still have their hands deep down the proverbial bowels of the game and are currently changing and cutting several significant game mechanics.

"Actually, could we make it a FPS instead? Or maybe try a Sci-Fi setting!"

For example, the post details that Blizzard is currently reviewing the core stats and the benefits that they provide to player characters, which seems like something you would/should not be doing if you are planning to ship your game within the next few months.

Additionally this quote from Jay Wilson, Game Director for Diablo 3 does not exactly inspire much hope that we'll be clicking our ways through hellish hordes any time soon:

"There’s a lot of work left to be done, though. We’re constantly tuning and making balance changes; it’s a massive task. Some of these changes can be seen in the beta, like changes to item rarity, the levels at which we introduce affixes, and how many affixes enemies can roll up. Some you can’t see in the beta, like balancing the difficulty of the entire game for four different difficulty levels, adding tons of new affixes, creating legendary items, filling out crafting recipes and itemization, working on achievements, and implementing Battle.net features. We’re also working on a number of other large systems changes -- specifically with the skill and rune systems. We're not quite ready to share what those are just yet, but we look forward to being able to do so in the near future."


Oh dear... I don't want you to "share changes" with us in the near future. I want to *play the goddamn game in the near future!*

Oh well, I guess Blizzard will be Blizzard but I guess this means that we should probably not expect Diablo 3 any sooner than Q4 2012. I'll be happy if it just doesn't slip into 2013.



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