Well it has been a long time since the last time I really posted on here. Life has been busy. Crunch mode happening at work is now coming to an end, summer is slowly creeping up on us and there has been a few games to come out in the last while to keep people busy.
Since Christmas I have been playing a few games, AoC, GTA, WoW, the odd game of NHL and a couple different games in the beta phase. Lets just say the first two weeks GTA came out I didn’t do much other then play that.
So lets start off with a quick review of Grand Theft Auto. This is the first version of this franchise that I bought on console. I have never liked playing the game on console in the past. Could be something to do with the obscene load times on the PS2. Or because when the PS2 was the big thing I really believed that anything on console will be and will control better on PC with mouse and keyboard. Needless to say this new chapter in the GTA life has changed my mind on that.
So I entered Liberty city as Niko, an ex merc for hire out of the Russia area of the world. I first assumed he 
was Chechen. He did not say anything through out the game to say otherwise. But I am probably wrong.
The intro cut scene was a little slow, but it did something I wasn’t expecting from GTA. It was a very movie like artistic intro that went straight into gameplay. I was pretty stoked. I probably put a good 6 hours into the game before I stood back up. I quite like the GTA games in general but this one was different. I found myself not running random people over, and was avoiding being chased by the police. I didn’t find myself a weapon and instantly start killing people. In retrospect I do not believe I even ran a red light if a cop was sitting at the lights.
The game is full of amazing voice talent, I am happy to report I got my dose of Laslo and of course the rest of the talk radio stations. What really amazed me though was the fact that if you failed a mission, if the person sitting in your car, or calling you on your cell phone when you are on your second attempt will have a different line of dialogue. I personally did not mind having to start the missions all the way back at the beginning even if I had to drive over the 3 islands purely because of that. This game blew my mind.
After completing the single player campaign that is when I jumped into the bulk of multiplayer. I couldn’t ask for more from Rockstar on multiplayer features for a game like GTA. They did an outstanding job. Especially on GTA Race, that mode is fantastic. If you know you are going to lose, just hop out of your car and get a rocket and wait for the first place car. You get him and you will piss someone off fierce and its great.
Now onto Age of Conan.
I have been waiting for this game for a long time. Since it was announced actually. However I did not want to sully my experience by going into the beta before the game was released. I was perfectly happy to be a complete noob the day the game came out. Now I am usually someone who will go to whatever server my friends are on, but this game is different. So the day the game came out while I was at work, I did a quick search on the forums for the list of guilds that are already known to be part of the server Deathwhisper. Low and behold, there are tons of guilds I recognize either from Ultima Online, Shadowbane, and even WoW. I had to apply to join an old UO guild that I remember fighting against back on Great Lakes. So I joined up with Gods Wrath Clan. Guilds been around forever.
I have been having a blast playing this game, but just like Vanguard this game was released before it was ready. But this one I will be playing through out the bumpy start unlike what I did with Vanguard. This client is utter rubbish and the amount of lag really gets to me when I am in the Villas. But at the end of the day it is a decent game, and has a lot of potential. That is if they don’t give into the complainers who joined a FREE FOR ALL PPV server. I actually cannot fathom why so many people are complaining about being killed randomly when they are running around Pontain. The place is one of the starting areas for resource skill training. Tonight I just trained my gathering skills, and I probably killed about 14 different people. They were standing at a full node of silver, copper, cotton; didn’t really matter. I was training they got in my way. I killed them. It was that simple. The great part about it is only one shit talked me after the fact.
Like I have been saying, I have been having a lot of fun with this game. However they have about two months to fix some of these massive issues in the client and in the game or I can see more then just a mass exodus happening and it will leave Funcom scratching their head.
More posts about AoC to come in the future.
Games, MMOs, Other
360, GTA, MMOs, PC Gaming
