City of Kainen

Posted on 28 June 2006 by FoxTwo

First off, I have just been playing Guild Wars for a little over a week. The good thing about guild wars is that the levelling is fast. In a little over a week, I have managed to get my “main” up to level 17. The level cap is 20, ie level 20s are the highest level there.

Secondly, their “magic items” have a colouring scheme which I think is pretty darn unique to them. “Normal” magic items are cyan, ie give you bonuses to some attributes or skills. Then there are the purple ones, where as far as I can see, are more powerful than the normal ones. They give bonuses which are more than what the cyan ones will give, but in addition, they also have a “negative bonus”, so something of yours will be lowered, be it movement speed, or armour, or even a skill. I have seen a gold-coloured item too, where the bonuses and the negatives are even more than the purple ones.

Then again, I have only been in-world for a week. I am still a newbie.

But a high-level one 🙂

Thirdly, the world of Guild Wars appear to be an Asian-influenced one, where the names of places and people are supposed to sound “oriental”. Well, at least to ang mo people they sound oriental. To me, some names of places sound damn weird, and most of the time the names are meaningless if I were to pronounce them in proper Mandarin or Cantonese.

My assassin char, Aleric, is my “main”. He is the one that is lvl 17 now, and about 80% of the way to 18. As of this writing, his travels have brought him to Kainen City. The thing is, once you cross over from the Shing Jea Island to the mainland, suddenly you are thrust into zones that have level 20 mobs wandering around. At the time when you get booted here from the island, you’re only about level 14 or 15. Survivability is not that great 🙂

The thing about Kainen City is that it reminded me alot of Maj’Dul, the city in EQ2. Mobs that wander around are high levels, they will kill you if you are not careful. Even getting a full group of lvl 20 henchmen is not a guarantee of survival if you decide to run through the streets of Kainen City.

Unlike Maj’Dul though, Kainen City is huge! The city itself is broken down into “subzones” where you may run across citizens who are in need of help (and hence you earn xps for their side-quests).

So far, this all still seems fun to me. Especially running around with my old pal from City of Heroes 🙂

Tags: , , ,

Posted in MMORPG | Tagged | Leave a comment

Renamed and Relocated

Posted on 26 June 2006 by FoxTwo

Yup, I have decided to finally make use of this blogspace. As you can see it’s been quite awhile since I wrote here. Also, I decided to combine all gaming-related blogs into one – for easier management. Life In Qeynos was started as an EQ2 record, and it is sad for me to see faithful followers of that blog come to a crashing halt – because I have quit playing EQ2.

Rather than starting a new blog for every new MMO/Game I play I may as well compile them all into one – here!

Well, to pick up where we left off, I stopped playing EQ2. Finances and Real-Lift(tm) got in the way. I have checked out Guild Wars and found it extremely fun and easy to play (heck, everything’s easy after coming from EQ2!). The one thing I really dislike about MMORPGs is that the designers always seem to “encourage grouping” and make certain quests undoable when solo. This was one of my beefs with EQ2 (and any MMO in general). I was pleasantly surprised to find that in Guild Wars, at least they give you AI henchmen. While not as bright as human-controlled characters, they do a decent job of most quests, as long as you know how to control them. Otherwise they just run headlog into the mobs and die a horrible death in 3 secs flat.

I am fortunate in a sense that an old friend from City of Heroes decided to join me. She too was in EQ2 but was on a different server, due to a period of time where we lost contact. We didn’t join up on the same server in EQ2, but here in Guild Wars, there are no “servers”, hence we can meet and join up.

Tags: ,
Posted in MMORPG, Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Great Gizmo!

Posted on 30 January 2006 by FoxTwo

First of all, click on the link above and find out all about TrackIR. If you really wanna get one, run down to Tecdrome at Sim Lim Square, level 5 near the escalators. It’s a game shop, and it sells gaming peripherals too.

Now, I bought this TrackIR thing around May 2005. Didn’t really use it much because at the time I was heavily addicted to Everquest 2, an MMORPG, hence I have very little use for it.

Lately, since I have been taking a break from Everquest 2, I decided to play my older unopened games which I bought last year too. Yeah I have quite a number of unopened/unfinished games cos EQ2 kinda took over my gaming life.

Anyway, I loaded up Falcon 4 Allied Force which I bought (yeah I know, downloading the Balkans campaign for free off the net as well as patching Falcon 4 original to Superpak 3 status is the same thing). I also decided to “get into” Lock On more seriously.

I do remember from my initial trial run of the TrackIR that it was really changing the way I play flight simulations. No longer do I need to use the POV hat switch on the joystick to look around. Now I look around the cockpit by turning my head.

“Wait” I hear you cry. “That is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. If I turn my head, I can’t see the monitor!!”

Well, not really. It’s a head-turning amplifier. You control how sensitive you want the amplification to be. You may turn your head 2cm to the right in real life but in the game you might have already turned 45 degrees or more. Looking up and down is the same. I have a weird problem with my head cos apparently I need to adjust it to almost max amplification for my head to look UP. Left, Right and Down remained at default settings, with some very minor tweaks to compensate for my unconcious head movements (which I didn’t find out about till I got this gizmo).

Anyway back to flight sims – yes, with this new gizmo, not only have I freed up 4 more keys at least (my hat switch is 8-way, but some games only recognise the 4 cardinal points), it made some game functions like PADLOCK VIEW obsolete. I do not need to “padlock” it in the game anymore. I can just LOOK at my target and use my head and eyes to track where the target has gone.

Trust me, if your head is titled up and to the right, your hands automatically know where to pull the joystick to, to bring the crosshairs over the target. In the past I have been trying to use the padlock function in the game but without much success. I usually get disoriented using the POV hat switch to slew the views around and it kinda gets all messed up.

What’s great is that now when the wingman says “Check your six”, I just turn my head and look at my six. If there’s a bandit on my tail I can pull a split-S without taking my eyes off target till it’s in my crosshairs and I get a splash.

I have tried to make TrackIR work with Operation Flashpoint though, but apparently the support for it back in 1998 (yes that is how old Operation Flashpoint is… it came out in 1998) was almost non-existant. It would be cool to turn the soldier’s head without turning the body.

Posted in Gaming Hardware | Tagged , | Leave a comment