Being XBox free has given me the chance to check out some stuff I’ve missed
Yesterday, UPS called me and said that I will be receiving a package between 8 AM and 7 PM tomorrow that requires a signature. Crossing my fingers that I will be home in time to receive said package. I haven’t been gaming too much these past two weeks, but I’ve been keeping up with some of the GDC news and found my gaming fix elsewhere. Check out my thoughts after the jump.
Retro Game Challenge (DS)
I’ve been a little disappointed by Guardia Quest, the RPG offering. I guess I’m receiving what I asked for, an old-school RPG in every sense of the word. One of the challenges is to grind up to a certain level, which was fine, the story is only marginally deeper than the original Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and when one of my party members dies it’s a major pain. I think the only unforgivable design choice in this game is the decision to give the spells random names. For example, one of the offensive spells is called “Megra”. You actually need to read the manual to figure out what the spells do, but it doesn’t even list all of them! If it was called “Firem” or something, it’d be much clearer. The graphics are spot on though, and I love the poor translation: “It costs ten ducats to rest at the inn. Don’t you feel asleep?”
Bully (Wii)
<yawn>
Warcraft III: Defense of the Ancients (Mac)
I haven’t played a non-flash game on my computer since Warcraft 3 and that was back when I was using my Dell, which has since died. My friend has been raving about the Defense of the Ancients mod for months so I figured I’d give it a whirl. Of course, I had to go digging around for my War3 and Frozen Throne discs but I couldn’t even find my Frozen Throne disc! As it turns out, Blizzard once again proved itself to be one of the awesomest gaming companies ever. Since I still had the FT case and the CD-Key, they just let me download the game from their site!
Anyway, DOTA is pretty fun. For anyone into PC RTSes, I strongly recommend checking it out. Then again, if you’re into PC RTSes, you probably already have. Even after I get my 360 back I think I’ll keep playing it to get myself ready for Starcraft 2. The mouse and keyboard doesn’t come too easily for me anymore. The only drawback of DOTA is that each game takes around an hour.
GDC News
We don’t usually do news around here, but with all my free time I’ve been keeping a bigger eye on things. Here’s a list of the things that piqued my interest the most:
OnLive’s Streaming Video Game Service – A lot of the buzz at GDC has been around the new OnLive Streaming Video Game Service. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you can check out the press release here. This new Cloud Gaming service plans on doing all the hard processing work for video games on servers far, far away from your TV. You just buy a little box and the video streams to your TV or computer, kind of like Netflix on 360. Ostensibly, this means that you might never need to upgrade your hardware ever again, and all games will be “streamed” to your home sometime in the future. This is an amazing idea, and I’m sure we’ll probably see something like it in our lifetimes as the model for game delivery continues to evolve. Unfortunately, I think in ten years we will be looking back at OnLive as something too far ahead of its time. Right now I just don’t think there is the bandwidth to support this kind of service for games like FPS and fighting games which cannot tolerate ANY latency issues.
Nintendo’s Press Conference – The biggest thing to come out of this press conference was the announcement that Nintendo is going to support high capacity SD cards. Not only will this allow you to store more stuff, but Nintendo has also had a system update (already live) that allows you to play virtual console games straight off your SD card. There is a lot of cool stuff Nintendo could do with this. Some of those ideas can be found here.
Mass Effect 2 – Finally, in news that probably only matters to me, Mass Effect 2 looks great. Also, Bioware says it’s going to be a shooter RPG. Not too sure what I think about that. This game is coming out next March and I for one cannot wait.
Leveling Down 
5 comments
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March 31, 2009 at 8:40 am
espion4ge
I remember playing DotA allstars back in the day. Great mod and there looks to be a couple PC games coming out based on it.
League of Legends
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/
Two main designers from the original DotA game decided to create this spiritual sequel as a standalone product. Release date set for some time in 2009.
Demigod
http://www.demigodthegame.com/
The developers of Sins of a Solar Empire decided to create a action/RPG/RTS with many concepts based on DotA. It supposedly comes out in mid April…
Maybe I’ll check them out!
March 31, 2009 at 12:13 pm
eeyore
i think part of the appeal of dota is that it’s a free mod, and it uses familiar mechanics from the war3 engine so that beginners can get into it easily. this creates a community which is largely self-sustaining and is critical to the mod’s success.
i think selling a similar game with a different engine will prevent these dota-based games from creating a critical mass, even if the gameplay is better.
March 31, 2009 at 2:43 pm
aTOM boomb
As long as League of Legends doesn’t require a subscription fee (as is the case with the wonderful bnet), I’m totally excited for it, assuming that it’s merely expanding on the existing DotA model with persisting traits/skills of the summoner the more you play.
Joe, can you explain why you consider it a drawback that a game of DotA takes about an hour? Any less, and I think you lose the depth of the hero potentials as they progress to level 25. I even find myself wanting to extend the game at times, because I didn’t get to buy all the pwnage items that I wanted in order to fully realize the beastliness of my hero.
March 31, 2009 at 4:15 pm
cmfl3x
Oh I just mean that it’s tougher for me to spend the time or to budget out the amount of time necessary to play a game. I’m not the only one who thinks that, it was mentioned in Gamasutra’s postmortem on Dota. You should check it out it’s good stuff. You want to get pwnage items but I just want to win and be done with it :)
March 31, 2009 at 5:04 pm
aTOM boomb
Ohhh, but the pleasure is in the journey to the top, my friend!! Basically, getting hero kills is an ancillary objective to the game, usually but not necessarily correlated to your final victory… but it is TOTALLY the most satisfying part of the game!
So does the “postmortem” article mean that DotA is generally regarded as dead in the realm of gaming? I’ve only picked it up relatively recently (last summer?), and the community on bnet still appears to be alive and well. Not to mention that there is still a consistent flow of revisions to the maps.