For the next few weeks, my Xbox is going to take a backseat to my favorite sporting event of the year: March Madness. What little time I have left for video games will probably be spent playing Dragon Age: Origins, and since we’ve covered that on the site, I figured I’d try something new: a video game bracket!

I’ve chosen 28 of my favorite games across 4 different categories (“regions”), and as the NCAA tournament plays itself out, so too will you get to watch this video game bracket play itself out. Why am I doing this? Well, I love brackets, first of all. Secondly, it’s a chance for me to take a trip down memory lane and narrow down some of my favorite games of all time. I recognize that a lot of times comparing games is like comparing apples to oranges, which is why I separated the games by genres (loosely).

Anyway, I’ve left the 8 seed open in all four regions, so I need YOU, the Leveling Down reader, to suggest games to finish out the bracket. Hit the jump to see the selection committee’s (aka, cmfl3x’s) criteria and some other notes about this totally awesome tournament.

You can access the entire bracket here:

March Madness – Video Game Style

Now, a couple of notes on how the games were chosen:

1. Video Games were split up into 4 Regions: The Hollywood Region (games with good stories – mainly RPGs), The M16 Region (shooters – any perspective), The Sun-Tzu Region (strategy games), and The Hodj Podj Region (miscellaneous games).

2. Games must have been sold for retail; thus Warcraft III is an option, but Defense of the Ancients (a mod), is not.

3. Games were seeded mostly according to critical acclaim. For recent games, I used metacritic, and for older games I did my best to guesstimate where they would fall. Probably not the best metric, but the best I could come up with for now.

4. I didn’t choose multiple games from any series, so you won’t see both Halo 2 and 3 in the field.

That’s it! I’ll be pitting these games against each other over the next few weeks, but be warned, I’ll mostly be arbitrarily choosing my favorites (but comments on why you feel a game should beat another will definitely have potential to sway my opinion). If there is a large outcry, maybe we could set up a poll, but you’ll have to let us know if you want that to happen – or we could do that next year.

Anyway, onto this year’s field! And remember, be sure to suggest games you think I’ve left out – there are 4 more spots to fill!

The Hollywood Region – Great Storylines

Matchups:
(1) BioShock vs. (8) TBD
(4) God of War vs. (5) Portal
(3) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic vs. (6) Beyond Good and Evil
(2) Metal Gear Solid vs. (7) Final Fantasy IV

(1) BioShock [360/PS3], metacritic = 96 – Although the story fizzled out at the end, Bioshock definitely has a story that sticks with you, and a plot twist that really gets in your head.

(2) Metal Gear Solid [PS1/GC], metacritic = 94 – Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece, this game helped to change video game storytelling and really put the scene into the cut scene. Narrowly edged out Metal Gear Solid 3, which is personally my favorite story.

(3) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic [Xbox/PC], metacritic = 94 – Every Star Wars fanboy’s dream, this game also featured some excellent plot twists and introduced Bioware as a story-telling developer to be reckoned with.

(4) God of War [PS2], metacritic = 94 – Even though I’m not a huge fan of the gameplay, God of War has an amazing storyline. Kratos seeking his revenge on the Gods is one of the best premises for a videogame, and his backstory makes it even more rewarding.

(5) Portal [360/PS3/PC], metacritic = 90 – This “add-on” in the Orange Box has one of the most cleverly told narratives in a video game to date. It’s not a story, per se, but the way Valve sets the mood and brings the game to its amusing conclusion is worthy of…cake.

(6) Beyond Good and Evil [Xbox/PS2/GC], ,etacritic = 87 – This game was a huge hit with the gaming community, but never had good sales. The characters and innovative story are what make this game, but unfortunately, nobody ever played it.

(7) Final Fantasy IV [SNES, GBA, DS], metacritic = 85 – This game is underseeded since the metacritic score comes from the DS version. My favorite Final Fantasy story ever. Final Fantasy VI’s Kefka was memorable, but this was the first Final Fantasy game where I actually cared about the characters and what happened to them. STONE!

(8) TBD

The M16 Region – Shooters

Matchups:
(1) Metroid Prime vs. (8) TBD
(4) Halo 3 vs. (5) Modern Warfare 2
(3) Goldeneye vs. (6) Doom 2
(2) Uncharted 2 vs. (7) Gears of War 2

(1) Metroid Prime [GC/Wii], metacritic = 97 – That Metroid Prime is the #1 seed in this region seems like an upset in itself, but the numbers don’t lie. Metroid Prime kept the feel of the classic games while switching to a first person perspective and remains my favorite Gamecube game to this day.

(2) Uncharted 2 [PS3], metacritic = 96 – This game could probably have made it into the Hollywood Region as well, but here it is matched up with Gears of War 2, the other 3rd person shooter in this bracket. I think this one might be a walk.

(3) Goldeneye [N64] metacritic = 96 – There is a reason why people keep requesting that Goldeneye be re-released: it is one of the best games ever, period. Sure, FPS games have taken huge leaps since then, but Goldeneye helped pave the way, especially on consoles. Fitting that it be up against the other old school FPS game, Doom 2.

(4) Halo 3 [360], metacritic = 94 – Why is Halo 3 #4 and Modern Warfare 2 #5? Simply put, Halo 3 has probably had more traffic over the course of Xbox Live’s history. Of course, it had a pretty big head start, but the fact that a million kids are still playing it as I type this gives it the slight edge.

(5) Modern Warfare 2 [360/PS3/PC], metacritic = 94 – What is there to write? The most complete multiplayer FPS game to date. It will battle it out with Halo 3, just like it does on the servers.

(6) Doom 2 [PC], metacritic = N/A – Back when you needed to use a modem to connect with other players, Doom 2 set the bar for first person shooters. It had no story whatsoever, but nobody cared – the secret tricks and traps, the deathmatch games, and the co-op deathmatch games were never forgotten by old school gamers.

(7) Gears of War 2 [360], metacritic = 93 – Gears of War 2 is here so I don’t get flamed by Xbox fans. It’s a great game, and probably could make the bracket solely on account of the assault rifle chainsaw alone.

The Sun-Tzu Region – Strategy Games

Matchups:
(1) Civilization IV vs. (8) TBD
(4) Warcraft III vs. (5) Dune 2
(3) Starcraft vs. (6) Halo Wars
(2) Advance Wars: Dual Strike vs. (7) Final Fantasy Tactics A2

(1) Civilization IV [PC], metacritic = 94 – One more turn. Players have been saying that to themselves for over a decade now with the Civ games, which task you with conquering the world in multiple different ways. This game features addictive gameplay that strategy gamers can’t get enough of.

(2) Advance Wars: Dual Strike [DS], metacritic = 90 – I’m shocked that this game is the 2 seed in this region, but that’s metacritic for you. An excellent turn based strategy game, it introduced battles on both screens (air on top, ground on bottom), which made for some pretty unique gameplay.

(3) Starcraft [PC/Mac], metacritic = 88 – 88? Seriously? Maybe game reviewers were just tougher back then. Starcraft is THE real time strategy game. It was so big it spawned super competitive, televised tournament circuits in Korea. It introduced the term actions per second. The landscape of video gaming was never the same again.

(4) Warcraft III [PC/Mac], Metacritic = 88 – Warcraft III, another Blizzard masterpiece, introduced hero units and greater micromanagement into real time strategy games. It also spawned the immensely popular Defense of the Ancients mod.

(5) Dune 2 [PC], metacritic = N/A – Dune 2 was the game that put RTS games on the map, both for gamers at large and for me personally. It can’t stand up to these heavyweights, but I thought it at least deserved some recognition. Watch out for sandworms.

(6) Halo Wars [360], metacritic = 82 – This is mainly here so certain readers of the site don’t lambaste me. In its defense, it is the best console RTS out there, hands down. All units!

(7) Final Fantasy Tactics A2 [DS], metacritic = 80 – The Final Fantasy Tactics games are an excellent series with very deep, strategic gameplay. You could literally spend 100 hours playing this game and not run out of things to do. Almost infinite bang for your buck!

The Hodj Podj Region – Other Games

Note: This is probably the most random region, I just tried to represent other genres as best as possible.

Matchups:
(1) Super Mario 64 vs. (8) TBD
(4) Warioware Inc., Mega Microgame$ vs. (5) NHL 94
(3) World of Warcraft vs. (6) Secret of Monkey Island
(2) Street Fighter IV vs. (7) Animal Crossing

(1) Super Mario 64 [N64],mMetacritic = 94 – Like Metroid Prime, Super Mario 64 took a beloved game and put a whole new twist on it. Unlike Metroid Prime, SM64 launched the 3-D era. Plus you could unlock Yoshi, which was awesome…

(2) Street Fighter IV [360/PS3/PC], metacritic = 94 – Street Fighter IV completely reinvigorated the entire fighting game genre, no small feat considering people had considered fighting games all but dead.

(3) World of Warcraft [PC/Mac],mMetacritic = 93 – Just like Starcraft, WoW is the pinnacle of its genre, the MMORPG. I think more hours have been sunk into WoW than it took to build America.

(4) Warioware Inc., Mega Microgame$ [GBA], metacritic = N/A – This was the first minigame collection I can remember that only gave you 5 seconds per minigame. A ridiculous premise, ridiculous games including picking a nose, and a ridiculous amount of fun.

(5) NHL 94 [SNES, Genesis], metacritic = N/A – My favorite sports game ever, and one of the last games before sports games got super complicated. I’m sure people would rather see some Maddens here but…oh well.

(6) Secret of Monkey Island [PC/360], metacritic = 88 – The token representative of the adventure game genre, this game featured great humor and great puzzles, a killer combination. I’ll never forget what to do with a rubber chicken attached to a pulley.

(7) Animal Crossing [GC, DS, Wii], metacritic = 87 – There are a multitude of games that task you with the mundane parts of our daily lives, but Animal Crossing was one of the first I found really memorable. How fun is it to catch fish and leave them in your friends’ mailboxes!?

Parting Thoughts
And that’s the almost complete Video Game Bracket! Post in the comments games you think I missed out and that I should include as the 8 seeds, or tell me I’m power crazy for even doing this! I’ll be watching 12 hours straight of basketball…

Since I posted about Blizzard on Monday, here’s another Blizzard related entry that I have been pondering as of late. I was at Target with my wife this past weekend, and as we were waiting in line to check out, I noticed that the kid in front of me, who was probably an underclassman still in high school, was buying a 60 day pre-paid World of Warcraft card. These cards are $30, and allow the World of Warcraft account holder to play the game for two months (the monthly subscription is $15 a month to play). Three thoughts went through my mind as I saw this WoW card go down the cashier belt:

1. People actually buy these things?
2. Do I say something?
3. Should Blizzard even be selling these?

1. People Actually Buy These Things?
The first thing that crossed my mind was, “Whoa – Target stocks WoW game cards?” It was quickly followed by, “Whoa – someone is actually buying one?” Who buys these anyway? Don’t you need a credit card to activate the account? I realized though that sure enough, maybe kids too young to have credit cards do fund their WoW game-time using cash. That’s what the kid did: he handed a tightly crumpled up $50 bill to the cashier to fund his WoW timecard and a pack of gum he grabbed from the candy section of the checkout.

I was a kid once. Where did he get a $50 bill at that age? I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a job. Suffice to say, the kid didn’t look like the straight A student type either. This made me wonder if that $50 bill was being used towards the best purchase in his life at the moment. Did he skip out on meals to save up to play the game two months longer? Was he not buying school books instead? Who knows.

2. Do I Say Something?
I’ve been through the World of Warcraft. That game took up a couple years of my life and it is probably the most addicting game I’ve ever played. For those who have never played it, the reason why it is so addicting for me is because of the ridiculously strong social element involved. You meet other players in the game, become friends, start a guild together, and depend on each other every night to run dungeons since you can’t solo them alone. The dungeons award treasures that you can wear and walk around in the world and be admired by newer players (being fawned over as a celebrity, even in a game world, never gets old). In short, there is a ton of positive reinforcement to playing the game and therefore it becomes very difficult to quit.

Fortunately for me, I had already graduated college then, had a nice job on Wall Street, and was able to simply go to work, come home, eat dinner, and play the game every night. I didn’t have much else of a care in the world, and so my non-work life revolved around World of Warcraft. Guildmates became my primary form of social interaction and we would stay up late into the night having fun – perhaps too much fun. But, I had no other real-life responsibilities at the time, so it was ok. Eventually I grew out of it (once I realized how much of a time sink it was and the fact that I wanted to get married).

However, for kids in school, or even college, I honestly think that playing World of Warcraft is a very bad idea. When I was working at my job, I didn’t have homework every night. I didn’t have to socialize at school and make friends. For kids to juggle World of Warcraft with going to school, I don’t think they will end up OK. Sure, there may be a select few that can engage in World of Warcraft and still go on to become super successful, but if I had kids, I wouldn’t let them play World of Warcraft. That’s just a bet I’m not willing to take. I believe that their focus will no longer be on school but on the game, and they’ll spend many of their hours thinking about how to get further in the game rather than how to get further in life. And if they’re having a tough time at school, World of Warcraft is a perfect escape for them to run away from their problems instead of dealing with them head on.

All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I saw the kid in front of me buying the game card. It’s not really my problem if a kid wants to buy something with his own money. Not like I’m his father, his teacher, or anyone of any authority over him. But it just made me sad to see the kid buying the card. In the end, I couldn’t say anything and watched the kid walk out the door with a 60 day extension on what I felt could potentially be harming his life. That led me to my final thought.

3. Should Blizzard Even Be Selling These?
In order to play World of Warcraft, I believe you have to activate the account with a credit card. Most players are old enough to have a credit card that gets billed every month if you are an active WoW player. But Blizzard was “smart” enough to release these pre-paid game cards for players that wanted to play but didn’t have credit cards to keep their accounts active.

That makes me really think though: what gamers don’t have credit cards? Kids. They’re not old enough to have credit cards, and sure, we can blame the parents for allowing their kids to play World of Warcraft, but it would have been a lot easier if these World of Warcraft game cards didn’t exist. That way, kids won’t be trying to find some dubious way to make money to get their next month’s WoW fix. If you want to play the game, you better be mature enough to have a credit card or know someone with a credit card that is willing to pay for you. Why don’t we let kids gamble in casinos? Why don’t we let them smoke? Drink alcohol? All of these things we believe kids won’t be mature enough to make a good decision on, and while World of Warcraft is a game, I also think it’s almost something more than that.

World of Warcraft is a dangerous game to play, and while I can’t necessarily blame Blizzard for these pre-paid game cards, I just wish they thought about the implications to allowing kids to play (and get addicted) to World of Warcraft. Maybe as a business, Activision/Blizzard’s bottom line is obviously most important, but for me as an aging gamer, I do care about our generation’s future – particularly gamers, since I still am one myself. The best I can say is for any of you readers considering playing World of Warcraft, really think about what you’re getting yourself into before you start!

This past weekend, I received an email from Blizzard Entertainment informing me that my account password had changed. The email went on to state that if I had requested the change, to disregard the email. But if I did not request the change, then I would need to contact Blizzard immediately in case my account had been compromised. I did not request the password change, so I got a bit worried. I tried to log onto my account on the battle.net website, and surely enough, my password was no longer valid. Someone had actually somehow hacked into my battle.net account! This freaked me out. Read on to see what transpired…

Luckily, as the account was still my email address, I was able to reset the password and log back into my account. When I logged in, the first thing I noticed was that the person who “hijacked” my account started the World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King 10 day trial. I am basically speechless that someone would do that. Does this mean that they’ve already logged in as one of my characters? Ugh.

I called up Blizzard’s customer support (and waited for 45 minutes) before actually getting through to someone. Once I did, she was able to verify that someone did get into my account, and that the person was in China. Wha? How did some Chinese gold farmer get into my account? And did they take all my moneys? How did they do that? I’m slightly concerned that this gold farmer was able to gain access to my WoW characters, but because I don’t play it much anymore it’s not as big of a deal. What bothers me is that on my battle.net account, all of my Blizzard games are registered there with their CD keys. I guess he now has CD keys to my copies of Starcraft and its expansion, Diablo II and its expansion, and Warcraft III and its expansion. Grr. At least this was before I bought Starcraft II, because that would be a problem if my Starcraft II key was compromised.

What did I do next? I ended up downloading all of the updates just to load WoW to see if the hacker did any damage (and hopefully kick them out as well once I logged in). All of this was over an hour after the password change request, and by the time I logged in, the damage was done. My main and basically all my alts were naked. Anything that wasn’t soulbound was sold and my inventory and bank accounts were practically empty. What was odd was that on my main, I had almost 1000 gold. I wondered if I really had that much when I quit playing, and if not, did that mean I took control of my account before the hacker was able to transfer the money elsewhere? I did notice a couple letters in my mailbox that consisted of something like 50 g each for the sale of Pristine Black Pearls or something at the Auction House, so it looks like the hacker put some of my stuff up for sale.

Fortunately, I think Blizzard deals with this all the time, so I was able to petition a GM and inform them that my account was hacked and all of my gear and items were basically sold. I actually thought about it for a little while if I wanted to get the GM to restore all my characters, because now I at least had nearly 1000 gold on my main. Maybe that was compensation enough? In any case, I ended up doing it because I felt that having no gear at all at that level would be too difficult if I were to want to play again.

Hours later, I got emails informing me that my characters had been restored. I logged into my main and apparently, if your characters were hacked and you lost all your gear, you get letters with gear attached to them. I think I got maybe 7-8 letters with 12 attachments each. It was pretty crazy to keep opening more and more epics. I also noticed that I had over 700 gold once my main character was restored. So what happened to all the money? Was the extra 250 gold on my hacked main a result of just all my epics being sold at a vendor? I was also surprised that the hacker had gone onto my level 2 alt that I used to store all my snowballs. Apparently they were all sold, because my alt got maybe something like 400-500 snowballs back in the mail from the GM!

In any case, looks like everything is restored, and I have changed the email and password to my Blizzard account. I still ask myself how the hackers did it though. How did they find my account? I doubt I have a keylogger installed on my machine and I have firewalls, spyware scanners, etc. I never fall for these stupid phishing scams, and I haven’t even played WoW or visited a WoW website in months. Did they just brute force guess my passwords?! And how did they get my email? I’ve never been successfully hax0red before, so this is all a little startling to me. I’ve since proceeded to try to change my passwords for every login of importance, but even then, it’s quite a harrowing task and now I need to actually implement a system for managing all of my accounts and passwords. So for those of you that are reading, I recommend you update your passwords from time to time – those Chinese gold farmers must be expanding to hacking now to try to meet their weekly gold quotas!

World of Warcraft & Team Fortress 2 continue to give PC gamers updates

It’s interesting for me to see the “evolution” of the PC gaming landscape. Growing up on Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem, I’ve lived through the rise and decline of the PC gaming scene, from the introduction of first person shooters, real-time strategy games, online multiplayer, 4X strategy games, and now MMORPGs. If you’ve also grown up with fond memories of Doom & Quake, I highly recommend checking out the book, Masters of Doom. It’s a well-written book that chronicles how John Romero and John Carmack met, formed id Software, and completely shook up the gaming industry. Having said that, today’s entry will contain my more general thoughts on the PC gaming landscape, and why I’m still excited for its present and future.

It’s funny to see how the last twenty or so years in gaming went – PC games spawned new PC games such as FPS and RTS games, and introduced multiplayer gaming. I remember the days of 3DFX, Voodoo cards, and OpenGL. Since then, consoles have really grown up. FPS gaming and multiplayer on consoles have pretty much caught up to PC games, albeit the lack of certain extras among many of them such as free content updates, dedicated servers, etc. RTS games and 4X strategy games are still in their infancy on the consoles, and I can’t really see them taking off too much due to the fact that while the lack of a mouse for a FPS game is not nearly as bad as a lack of a mouse in a RTS/4X game where you’re just navigating around a map. Still, games like Halo Wars and Civilization Revolution are trying. I’ve yet to see a true console MMORPG yet on the 360 outside of Final Fantasy XI (ugh), so maybe we have a ways to go before that starts happening.

In any case, it looks like the PC gaming scene has changed drastically, forming silos around specific companies and their storefronts. Whereas the 360 has the Live Marketplace and the PS3 has the PSN store, there is no real unifying Windows store. Microsoft finally released a Windows Live Gaming store this past week, but it’s far too late and the Windows “Live Gaming” scene is practically dead anyway. I’m appreciating what each of these major PC companies are doing to not only keep PC gaming alive, but to really set themselves up to be the saviors of PC gaming.

The first and most prominent company to keep things going is Valve. If you’ve played Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc. then you’re probably someone that  can’t dislike the company. Nowadays PC gamers have Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 to play, and while Valve has not quite delivered what they promised in their support for the Left 4 Dead franchise, Team Fortress 2 just continues to ridiculously grow. You can pick up Team Fortress 2 for only a couple dollars these days on the PC, and yet the developers keep adding more and more content. I played through Team Fortress 2 on the Xbox 360, and that was just a barebones version. On the PC, new updates come out all the time, with new weapons and customizable gear for each class, maps, hundreds of new Achievements, and all sorts of gameplay/balance changes. With the newest update, Valve is giving players the ability to customize their hats and weapons for their equipment slots, bringing this FPS game more and more into the realm of MMORPG. It’s fantastic and if you’re a Team Fortress 2 PC gamer, this is a game that just keeps on giving. Kudos to Valve, as Team Fortress 2 on the PC really demonstrates the difference between a PC FPS and a console FPS.

The other company that has been keeping PC gaming relevent for as long as I can remember is Blizzard. People still play Starcraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III today, and excitement continues to build for the future releases of Starcraft II and Diablo III. While I’ve mentally moved on past World of Warcraft, the newest patch and the upcoming expansion are really making me reconsider jumping back into the game, as the most recently released patch adds full-on matchmaking for dungeons, which means you can easily find a pickup group through an easy to use in-game interface rather than going to town and shouting “LF1M healer”. The upcoming expansion has the developers revisiting the core gameplay world and changing many aspects of that rather than adding in a new continent like Lich King did. In a sense, it is going to bring the WoW population back to the core world, which has been a ghost town since the Expansions. Perhaps when the Cataclysm expansion hits, I may have to check WoW out again.

Stardock is a company that isn’t as strong as Valve or Blizzard but still has PC gaming relevance. In fact, outside of Blizzard, Stardock may be among the last major PC gaming companies that has not started making console games. I’m playing through Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate now, and while it’s not exactly a new game, it’s one of the best 4X strategy games I’ve ever played and I can’t imagine seeing a game of this depth and strategy on a console. The competition that Stardock’s Impulse store gives to Valve’s Steam storefront is a boon for us gamers, as it not only makes the two storefronts compete for our gaming dollars, but each store continues to introduce new features that make you feel more like part of its community. While I didn’t feel that Sins of a Solar Empire had as much depth as Galactic Civilizations II, Stardock continues to work on expansions to this game, to the pleasure of its many fans.

Another company that seems to support the PC gaming scene surprisingly is EA. Of course, the entire Sims franchise has been a huge moneymaker for EA, so they can’t be that against PC gaming. I have the new Command & Conquer 4 Beta installed on my PC, perhaps the last of the franchise that will be coming out in March. Also in March is Battlefield Bad Company 2, a PC FPS game that will support servers – something that the Modern Warfare 2 PC version took away. Let’s also not forget about Dragon Age: Origins, the new RPG game that supposedly plays a lot better on the PC than either of the console versions. So as much as anyone may dislike EA, we can see that the company is still keeping the PC hardcore gaming thriving with their string of varied PC titles: a RTS game, a FPS game, and an RPG game.

Finally, this past week I’ve written about a couple different DotA games, and aTOM boomb has shared his impressions on a couple as well. In any case, I feel like the DotA genre will continue to grow like the Tower Defense genre did. Both genres originated as custom mods in Blizzard’s RTS games, and they will most likely do quite well for PC gaming. I would be interested in seeing a FPS + DotA combination game on the 360, but that may be a few years out.

In any case, while I do tend to spend more time on the 360 than the PC for my gaming, the PC gaming scene is far from dead and I have not only these major companies to thank, but all of the others that still recognize PC gaming and continue to provide us with solid titles that not only play best on the PC, but make use of the PC’s strengths as a gaming platform as well. 2010 looks to still be a big year with PC gaming, as Starcraft II has to come out…right?!

Gaming took a backseat to a lot of wedding planning this week, but since I was on the road I ended up getting a bunch of portable gaming in. espion4ge beat me to Rhythm Heaven which is next on my DS list, so I won’t talk about it here. But yes, the theme of my gaming week would be variety. Onward!

Retro Game Challenge (DS)
I finished the last challenge in the last game only to find out there is ONE MORE retro game challenge: beat all 8 of the games. Considering the length of some of these games and the fact that one or two of them don’t “end” after finishing the first time, it’s going to be quite a difficult mountain to climb. I’m not sure if I have the patience or the dexterity to finish off this challenge, but I have a six hour plane ride next Friday so I guess I’ll find out!

Halo Wars
I planned on finishing the Legendary campaign and all the single player achievements but got too distracted playing the multiplayer. It’s so addicting! Now my team and I are coming up against a lot more experienced players and seeing all types of strategies that we don’t know how to deal with. I guess I need more practice…or maybe I’ve plateaued? Either way, it’s still a lot of fun. Again, if you’re on the fence, at least give Halo Wars a shot as a rental.

Warcraft III: Defense of the Ancients (Mac)
I’m starting to really get into the game, even though I know I’m a few years too late. I got to play my first two matches against human players and it was even more fun than playing against the AI. I got a new mouse for $13 dollars off of a slickdeal and have been using DOTA to test it out. Good times all around.

Dead Space
Started this game. It’s pretty freaky but I think I can handle it. Got caught up in other stuff but I’ll play this whenever it’s light outside, heh.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS)
I played a lot of this game in the car, its gameplay is simple but addicting. It’s a bit awkward to switch between platforming controls and stylus controls for the puzzle element, but I’ve gotten used to cradling the stylus in my hand without using it. Still I wish there was some sort of stylus glove or something. Actually, there probably is…

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.

While I didn’t take too much to the Burning Crusade expansion when I tried it about a year and a half ago, I gave Wrath of the Lich King a shot since Blizzard was offering a 10-day trial. I figured, if anything, it’d give me another article to write up. I only had an epic’ed out level 60 mage that I burnt out with back in the original release, and ended up skipping the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Read on if you’re curious about what I went through when I tried logging onto my level 60 that I hadn’t logged on with in years. That and my experiences with the Death Knight class.

One of the first things I noticed was the new Achievement system like on the Xbox.

Logging back on as my end-game level 60
There was a sense of pride I had with my level 60 several years ago. After all, I had run so many raids and did so much planning to get my mage to where she was that day. I eventually burnt out because I realized that with all of that work I put into the game, it was all meaningless when new content and items continued to come out and make my planning and hours of grinding obsolete. What was the point running a dungeon over and over again to get a drop only for it to be replaced months later by a newer, better item? I couldn’t beat the game. So I stopped.

Coming back to the character years later was definitely quite weird. First of all, I already forgot how to play, and I had a full talent tree that needed to be specced but I had no idea where to put the 49 or so points. The mage talents had changed so much that I didn’t know what to do. The thing was, the talent tree even went further down since players could now level to 80. I was also overwhelmed by all of the items I was carrying. I had hundreds of gold, but my entire bank and nearly every single item slot in my bags was filled up. I had no idea what half those items were for anymore. Raiding gear? Fire Resist gear? What is all this?! It also didn’t help that here I was sitting at the bank in Ironforge, and all of these Level 80s are running around trying to gather people for instance runs. I guess some things never change.

In any case, I was too overwhelmed. I tried continuing where I left off, which was pretty much the beginning of the Burning Crusade expansion land, but it’s so boring out there killing boars and whatnot. Plus, I kept getting ganked by level 80’s! Apparently I didn’t take the “Commander” title out of my name soon enough so I was a nice honor target. My old character wasn’t as easy to resume as I thought. So instead I said, “Forget this – maybe I should start fresh with the Death Knight.”

Creating my new Death Knight, Ryoma

My Death Knight Experience
The Death Knight is a new class offered in this World of Warcraft expansion, available to anyone that has at least one level 60 character on any server. The Death Knight is evil so maybe I should go with Horde on this one. And I never got to play as the Blood Elves, so a Blood Elf Death Knight named Ryoma was born.

The Death Knight starts off at level 55 instead of level 1, so in a sense, it’s kind of a good way to continue the World of Warcraft game if you skipped out on Burning Crusade like I did and had no idea what to do with all of your items and stuff you collected in the original game. It’s a fresh start but not too far back.

How did the Death Knight play? Honestly, it was kind of boring – sort of like a debuffing rogue I guess. I liked when I was the Warrior class I could just charge into any enemy at the hit of a key and the rage meter was neat. The Death Knight sort of has a Scorpion “Get Over Here” type of thing where he pulls an enemy towards him. Unfortunately, the cooldown is quite long on that so it’s not like you can pull every enemy you see that way. His attacks all seem to be based off of different debuffs on units, which when used increase his action bar. Once high enough the action bar allows the Death Knight to use certain skills like Death Coil, a ranged attack that either damages enemies or heals friendly undead units. But in the end, I think I just liked my mage a lot more and the glass cannon style aproach to fighting in World of Warcraft.

The Death Knight campaign itself is actually pretty good. It’s only about three hours long, but I thought it had a decent amount of variety. There were some initial quests where you talk to the Lich King, then take on some quests that deal with killing the Scarlet Crusade. It was kind of neat because if you were a Warcraft III player, you could see how there was a flying Necropolis over the human area with the undead pushing upon human territory.

Back in my day, we had to save up money to get a mount. Nowadays the kids just steal ‘em?

I undertook a mission where I had to go “steal” a mount to make it my own, kill civilians and Scarlet Crusaders, and even sneak/disguise myself as a human to get by certain areas. Every mission reward was basically a blue item to replace all of the green gear I started with, so in a sense it was a pretty good hook to keep playing to get all of those shiny blues. There was also a lot more variety and imagination in some of these missions as well. It wasn’t just the simple “Kill 10 enemies” or “collect 5 drops” – there was definitely effort put into the story. Collecting ghouls, dueling other death knights, ambushing a lone human scout, infiltrating a fortress, etc. You even rode a Frost Wyrm mount and were ordered to kill foot soldiers on the ground. There were a couple of those “kill x number of enemies” quests, but I thought it was neat that one was assigned to me by Baron Rivendale, the boss of the Stratholme dungeon.

Hurling blasts down upon Scarlet soldiers can be pretty fun!

What I also found interesting was that as the missions went on, you would see the land changing, as the blight would spread out to consume the human area and more ghouls and eventually Abominations would be walking around, culminating in the full scale attack of the human land when you’re on the Frost Wyrm. At first I wondered how the heck this sort of persistent change could take place because other players were also wandering around this same world as me. I mean, if they were still doing the keep infiltration missions, wouldn’t my full-scale attack on the Scarlet Crusade impact that?

I realized what had happened and it’s kind of a genius idea that Blizzard did. Basically, each section of the storyline was its own instance of the same zone. So even though the land looked the same, you would only be on that instance if you completed the right quests for it. Perhaps there were three instances for that same Death Knight world in total – one for the early stage, one for the mid stage, and finally one for the end. That’s how people can still be running around and not be interrupted with your quests – they’re in that same zone because they are on the same zone-related quests as you.

After I completed my assault mission, the Lich King asked me to move on to the next area, where I would join Highlord Darion Morgraine as he leads thousands of Scourge with an attack on Light’s Hope Chapel. When you agree to the battle, there’s a 5 minute countdown before it starts (I guess to allow other Death Knight players to join in). Once the five minutes were up, the entire Scourge army rushes Light’s Hope Chapel and proceeds to attack any humans defending it. You get a massive buff, which ups your damage into the thousands and regeneration such that it is impossible to kill you. All you do is wail away at any human enemies you see. I thought it was awesome.

Buff allowed me to land a 14k critical attack

Eventually, Morgraine fails and admits defeat to the paladin Tirion Fordring. The Lich King himself appears and admits to the fact that he sent Morgraine on a mission that was expecting to fail. Mograine gets pissed, helps Fordring attack the Lich King, and the Lich King retreats. At that point Morgraine believes that the Death Knights have fallen because they should no longer follow the Lich King, and tells me to go make friends with the Horde (or Alliance, if you’re an Alliance Death Knight) by giving me a letter to give to the side’s leader.

Once I got warped to Ogrimmar, I was to deliver a letter to Thrall that allowed me to ally myself with the Horde. It was very jarring to suddenly be warped to the front of Ogrimmar, where I found dozens of high level Horde players dueling. This was in stark contrast to there being almost no other human players around in the Death Knight starting zones. I made my way towards Thrall in his thrown room, but along the way orc guards boo’ed at me, throwing rotten fruit and objects at me denouncing me for being a Death Knight. Pretty cool and atmospheric!

“Today marks the first of many defeats for the Scourge! Death knights, once in service of the Lich King, have broken free of his grasp and formed a new alliance against his tyranny!”

Eventually I delivered the letter to Thrall and he commanded that everyone in the Horde army was to accept me as one of their own, and it felt like the end of Star Wars when I turned around, looked at the crowd, and smiled. But I didn’t have a medal. I simply sat down and logged out. Joking of course, but yeah once the Death Knight campaign was complete, I wasn’t about to go mix it up back with the regular people looking for 5-man dungeons and all that. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I was done.

A dancing Death Knight gnome. Now I’ve seen it all…

Every race can make Death Knights?
Part of me doesn’t like the idea that Death Knights are not only open to both sides, but to every race as well. It’s almost making a mockery of it, but I guess it’s honestly the easiest way to making “everyone” happy. After all, Blizzard probably had a lot of headaches trying to balance content when there were Shamans on Horde and Paladins on Alliance. I decided to push it a little and go silly: a Death Knight Alliance gnome. I wasn’t about to play through the Death Knight starting zone again, but I just wanted to see if it was possible and sure enough, I had a dancing Death Knight gnome. Something just didn’t sit right with me after that that someone so dark could have such a silly dance…

Infinite Undiscovery – Only about nine hours in and seems like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. Annoyed a little bit that you can only save at predesignated spots, so it’s tough to stop until you get to the next one. I guess that’s typical of “old-school” Japanese RPG games though so I’m sort of used to it already.

My new PC – Most of this past week was spent messing around with my new PC. After installing my new graphics card, I started going through and installing all sorts of games that I bought years ago that ran a little sluggishly on my old system: Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Oblivion, Age of Empires III, etc.

With my new machine and graphics card, I’m able to run Battlefield 2 on 1280×1024 at max settings for everything and still rock a 70+ framerate. I decided to be a little more adventurous and download the Crysis demo to see how it would go. Outlook: not good. On 1280×1024, even at its lowest settings, I had a framerate in the teens. The smoothest framerate I could get was about 40 when running in 1024×768 at the lowest graphics settings. Graphics looked kinda blocky at that level. Freaking Crysis. I can’t even run it on medium settings on 1024×768 without it stuttering haha

I also went ahead and re-installed World of Warcraft on my new machine, and my patching is fully caught up now (after several hours of torrenting through all the patch downloads). I want to give the 10 day trial for Wrath of the Lich King a shot, if anything at least to see how the game runs on my rig. Also, since I already have a level 60 I can try out the Death Knight class. I just need to figure out when is the best 10 day time for me…

Recently, I decided to reinstall WoW and download the expansion since I was given a free 10 day trial for The Burning Crusade. I only planned to devote only a day of gaming to it, so feel free to read up on what I experienced if you are curious about the trial. There wasn’t much point in spending more since the trial capped it so I could not level to 61. So what did I experience in my short time with the first World of Warcraft expansion?

It was weird to enter the game again, as I wasn’t sure what was going on. I appeared in Ironforge, and surprisingly, it was pretty empty. Granted, it was early in the morning, but I also assumed that most players were probably in Outland and not spending their time in Ironforge any longer.

My talents were all reset, so I went ahead and tried going full fire tree for my mage to check out the new talents. After walking through the portal in the Blasted Lands, the quests began. The quests were pretty simple, and by the time lunchtime rolled around, I was already halfway to 61. I was actually not a fan of the Outland world – it was pretty deserted and devoid of interesting structures or wildlife.

It felt weird getting green and blue quest rewards and comparing them to my epics to see which one was better. Somehow, part of me didn’t want to give up all those epics that I had earned when I was 60 but I knew that they were all worthless now. What a waste…

I decided that afternoon that I also wanted to try out one of the new instances to see how it was, so I found a group and entered The Blood Furnace, a wing of the Hellfire Citadel. This was a 5-man dungeon recommended for 61-63, but I was a pretty much fully decked out epic 60, so they took me along. It was weird – my party consisted of a warrior, a druid, a paladin, another mage, and myself. What was strange was the paladin was the main healer and the druid tanked in bear form. The warrior was complaining that the druid was now a better tanker, so he told the druid to tank. In the two years or so of playing the game since WoW launched, only a Protection specced Warrior was able to Tank. Now I’m seeing other classes taking it while the Warrior is going DPS? Weird stuff.

The dungeon was relatively short; there were only 3 bosses in there and it took about an hour and a half to clear through. Most mob packs were 2-3 and we got a few adds at times, but for the most part it was typical instance running. One of three blues that dropped from the three bosses I could have used to replace my epic gloves, but they were so similar I let the other mage have them (plus, I didn’t know if I was even going to continue playing after the trial).

Screenshots of the instance bosses:

The first boss we encountered, called “The Maker”

The second boss: a big jellyfish named “Broggok”

Final boss of the dungeon: a dark dwarf named Keli’dan the Breaker

After I finished the dungeon, I didn’t feel any sort of desire to continue playing WoW. It seemed like the same old stuff and way too much of a timesink. I heard one guy in my group say he had run that same dungeon 30 times already since he was looking for a drop. That’s just nuts! I couldn’t imagine spending that much time in WoW anymore, as all of this gear now can only depreciate in value.

Towards the end of the day, I was pretty much right at the spot where I would turn to Level 61, so there wasn’t much more I was interested in doing in the game. I’m glad I decided to try the WoW expansion trial without getting sucked back in, as I can go back to enjoying my 360.