Leveling Down

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.
More »

This game seems kinda freaky, but I’ll man up!

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…

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.

More »

Hey boss, got another quest for me?

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.

More »

Command & Conquer 3: Red Alert – cmfl3x and I finally completed the Soviet campaign! Slowly but surely we’re making our way through. Expect my impressions on the game soon.

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…

The entrance of one of the new instances in The Burning Crusade

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?

More »