Good question, but I have an answer for you as well! When not doing irrelevant other things like for example earning money, I’ve been working on a new little project I wanted to build for quite some while, but never got around to do it. As I mentioned before, I was always quite the sucker for achievements in games. Now I’ve certainly realized that my collection of roughly 300 Xbox360 games just for achievement farming purposes was a bit stupid (that’s ~5000 Euro down the drain … seriously, what was I thinking!?), but there’s a new playing field with much more games and much fairer prices – the iPad (or iPhone)! Sure, GameCenter could be implemented much better, but achievements are achievements.

Now for Xbox360, I always loved to visit trueachievements.com, but there’s no such thing for the iOS platform (at least not that I’m aware of) – well, was, because that’s exactly what I was working on. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide any kind of web feed or site to grab achievement info, so all data has to be entered by hand, but still, it’s much better than all these half-dead, WordPress-based crap sites I was looking at. I hope I can turn the project into something really great, but right now, this is already what I had in mind – just minus the community response, which so far has been zero. This should really change! Well, go visit GameCenter Achievements if you are so inclined, and if you are at all interested in iOS achievements, go sign up as well and post some solutions!

Oh, remember the Great Gift Pile raffle on Steam? Well, of course I didn’t win anything …

That 59 up there really doesn't help my OCD.

One thing you can be pretty sure of is that Valve already made a note reading “great success” the minute after the Great Gift Pile holiday sale event was over. Hell, they probably made that note a minute after it started, considering how little they had to risk for massive rewards. Of course, nobody would have even remotely considered Valve being a charity, but seriously, most of the “gifts” that were handed out here went into Valve’s direction. Not that I should be the one to complain, since I followed the event from start to end, buying a lot of games on the way.. At the beginning, it was simply for fun and because I had some money to burn, but after a few days, I became more and more curious how many “gifts” I’d actually get, and how many of these would actually be decent. At the very least, I’d probably end up with some decent games at discount prices, so what’s to lose?

I only bought games at prices up to €5, which were probably the majority, and used package deals as much as possible (including the Humble Indie Bundle 4, which I had already purchased ahead of the event). Starting on the 26th, I also avoided to buy games with huge download sizes since my internet connection was barely able to keep up with all the downloads. Seriously, having to download almost 13 gigabytes for Wings of Prey really sucked on a 1mbit connection. Of course, I also played all of the eligible “free-to-play” games – but wasn’t able to get two of the associated achievements due to difficulty and/or bugs – and did all the tasks on Steam.

Sure, the job description asked to be "flexible", but this is taking it too far. Also, nice shoes.

While there were quite some games among the objectives that were either not that good (The Polynomial, Guardians of Graxia) or just really confusing (AI War, Fate of the World, also The Polynomial), definitely the worst offender was CrimeCraft: GangWars, and certainly not because it was confusing. Instead, it was a laggy, boring and ugly mess of a MMOFPS, which also stands for everything F2P games are loathed for, as you’ll get bombarded with advertisements for the in-game store from the point you log in the first time. While the requirements for unlocking the Winter achievement looked easy enough (get a total of 200 points in Snowball Brawls), getting there was an exercise in masochism. With the amount of lag going on in simple 3vs3 matches (or actually with any amount of players), throwing, let alone aiming the snow balls was pretty much impossible. That the snow balls often “missed” even when they clearly shouldn’t have was another issue, but at least that also affected the other players. Adding insult to injury, every time I died – and I died often – I had to sit through 20+ seconds of respawn time. I used to be a major achievement whore on the Xbox360, but even for the special Steam event, having to play utter dreck like CrimeCraft made me feel slightly dirty.

You can probably understand my relief when finally the following text appeared after a match …

… but guess what, the Steam achievement didn’t unlock. Given the overall performance of CrimeCraft, that was almost to be expected. I never tried again.

This must be the entrance to the Canals! What else could possibly be behind this giant portal?

Clear runners up in the “terrible game is terrible” department can be awarded to yet another free-to-play MMO: Rusty Hearts. Although the achievement was actually obtainable, the game crashed just when I had completed the quest that unlocked it. Fortunately, I was still able to turn it in after logging back in, but that should just not happen. Crashes aside, Rusty Hearts is an online hack-and-slash with a progression that basically defines the term “generic”: your first quest is to “clear Canals B3 Normal”. The second quest is “clear Canals B3 Hard”, which is exactly the same as Normal, just for 2-3 players, even though it wasn’t any more difficult alone. And the third quest, you guessed it, would be “clear Canals B3 Very Hard”, tuned for 3-4 people. While this time around the monster’s health was noticeably increased, it was still pretty easy alone, and of course, neither the environment nor the enemies changed between quests. In any case, the “gameplay” consisted of killing a group of monsters, collecting meaningless stuff from the floor, getting annoyed about the randomly disappearing skill icons on the hot bar, killing the next group of enemies, and so on, until a boss had to be defeated, after which the game either crashed or not. Definitely exciting stuff, although I didn’t stick around to see if quest 4, presumably “clear Sewers B2 Normal”, would be even more riveting. It’s actually the second game of this nature I had the “pleasure” of playing – the first being the equally bad Vindictus – and I just don’t get who’s actually playing this kind of garbage for more than a few minutes.

Something I also don’t understand is why Steam’s service is so unstable, given the shitloads of money Valve must make from it. At times, the download servers didn’t respond for hours, and the inventory system also crashed more than just once. The Steam client also liked to freeze on starting games quite often, a testament of the instability of the entire platform under heavy load. This is something Valve really should have fixed by now, considering how many years Steam is on the market. It’s also a damn shame the Steam client doesn’t allow the user to limit parallel downloads or set priorities to specific games, but I guess that’s just relevant to people with slow connections (which, at least to Valve, obviously don’t exist).

After spending quite a good amount of money, it was almost ironic that I had the most fun with a free-to-play title: Champions Online. I had never even looked at it before since the whole super hero vibe didn’t appeal to me, but it’s a decent little MMORPG with some fun ideas. For the few hours I needed to complete the achievement, I felt at least entertained and might indeed give it another go later.

With all the achievements I had to complete, of course something else got the short end of the stick: finally finishing Skyrim, let alone touching any other of the games in my ever-growing backlog. Thanks to Christmas, the list only became longer as I was gifted Saints Row 3 and Batman Arkham City; in other words, two more major games that take a bit longer to complete than your average Call of Duty campaign. Oh well, maybe I’ll get to them before the summer sale …

The not-so-glorious final result with 59 objectives completed, minus 7 coal I wasted on crafting. In total, I got 42 coal, a good amount of totally useless vouchers, and two old (but good) games.

Today, I still have some objectives left to complete, but I just can’t be bothered anymore. I quickly finished Magicka, Hoard and BIT.TRIP BEAT (which was totally worth the time!), but after two weeks of playing tons of different games, I am just terribly exhausted. Also, I doubt it would help my chances on winning the big prize anyway. I’ll see tomorrow!

My thanks go to the helpful people of SteamCheeves.com and the Great Gift Pile Wiki, which I also worked on for a while, until some vandals messed things up.

Seems I spoke ill too soon about Star Wars: The Old Republic. While I didn’t have remotely as much time as I wanted to due to the Steam sale and a still unfinished Skyrim, I did put a good amount of hours into the latest World of Warcraft killer over the last few days, and I can report that I more and more like what I see.

The thing I was most skeptical about was the fully voiced quest texts – considering how often Blizzard had to rewrite quests because they just didn’t work or needed retconning, I thought this to be a rather bold, if not insane, idea. Also, why bother with voiceover when you just power through quests anyway, right? Well, wrong, because this is what makes SW: TOR so much different from Blizzard’s MMO behemoth: it has an actual, well crafted story, not just a ton of quests that have little relation to each other, so you probably don’t want to rush it anyway. How this story is delivered is identical to games like Mass Effect, which I absolutely loved despite not being a fan of Science Fiction at all, so even though full voiceovers and cinematics may not be the most practical in terms of game updates, it’s certainly more immersive than a window full of text. In short: questing in SW: TOR is much more enjoyable than in any other MMO I’ve seen so far, simply because even though certain mechanics are the same, the delivery is almost like in a single player game. And even when you are in a group, the mere fact that every player can chime in with their own line of dialogue is a clever enough mechanic to make group play worth it – way more than just adding an experience bonus.

In that regard, it doesn’t even matter that many systems in SW:TOR are pretty much identical to WoW – I mean, what else would you want them to be? It’s not like WoW invented stuff like global cooldowns and talent trees in the first place, but all of that works perfectly well, so it’s actually a good thing they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel like for example Age of Conan (which didn’t go so well, as you might remember). As long as the developers bring some truly unique ideas to the table, I have no objections against copying as many good features from the competition as possible.

You can make Lady Gaga envious with a hat like that!

Of course, you can’t really see these new ideas in the first few levels, that’s why I said I spoke too soon. I’m now playing a level 17 Bounty Hunter who has just boarded her (stolen) ship, and I doubt I’ve seen all the new ideas Bioware has in store, but what I’ve seen so far convinces me: a clever way to implement crafting without having to grind all the time, equippable companions that function much like the party members in Mass Effect, don’t totally suck in combat and are actually integral to the story, player-owned starships that can be equipped and flown into battle, fun abilities like Death From Above that might just work like your standard WoW skills, but look much cooler … yep, there’s clearly nothing that makes SW:TOR stand out from the crowd or copycats, nothing to see here, move along.

But there’s some shadow among the light as well, like the insane amount of running you have to do before getting a mount. Seriously, the cities are huge – why put the auction house in the very last corner? Or that your companions might want to talk to you in private – I don’t mind that at all, but does it really have to be in a Catina that’s only reachable by a foot march that can take several minutes? Most of the city is empty anyway, why not just talk about it on the street when nobody’s around? It sure helps to make that mount look much more desirable. Also, despite all the carefully crafted voice acting, there are some occasions when the actor’s tone completely changes between sentences, making the impression that nobody bothered to listen to the recordings in sequence before putting them into the game. Of course, that’s all rather minor stuff – the excessive running becomes tedious after a while, but that was exactly the same with vanilla WoW. It’s room for improvement, but not the end of the world.

In the end, it’ll all depend on how fast Bioware can add additional content to the game and if that content is any good, but at least the rate of bug fixing patches is rather high, which is more than one can expect from MMO developers in this day and age. In any case, I’ve got a feeling that Star Wars: The Old Republic is a game everyone who has the slightest interest in MMORPGs should at least give a try, and that’s really something you couldn’t say about many recent MMO games.

NB: In my video I said that there’s no way to skip quest text. This was incorrect, as you can skip through dialogue by pressing the space bar. I apologize for the error.

Hi, I'm Jaquelina, and I'm a holiday gnome!

T’is the season indeed, so let me be the first to wish you Happy Holidays! Have a quiet, peaceful and enjoyable time, maybe with your family, maybe with a good game or two, or even both.

Click the image for 33.3% (repeating of course) more readability!

Just a quick heads up since I spent a good few hours playing Champions Online: Free for All in order to unlock the Steam achievement for the Great Gift Pile raffle. I’ve created the visual guide above for the incredibly helpful Great Gift Pile wiki, but I thought I’d post it here for, uh, posterity? I just like to have my stuff in one place, I guess.

So far, the raffle was one great disappointment, though: 14 objectives completed, 12 coal, one -25% voucher for TellTale games (which are usually crap anyway) and one -50% voucher for GTA: Vice City, which is not just dirt cheap, but also ancient. But you can always do worse, and so I did – crafted seven coal into a -50% voucher for Dungeons of Dredmore, which is also completely worthless considering I already have it and it’s included in the Humble Indie Bundle #4 for way less than the price Steam asks. Still, a thoroughly enjoyable event – I have spent more money for way crappier games, honestly. And since the raffle forces me to actually play (most of) the games, I at least take a look at them – something I’d likely never have done for most Indie stuff.

Oh, and to my surprise, Champions Online isn’t even half bad for a free to play game!

I just can't get enough ...

With all the bad stuff going on in the world, it feels a bit silly to complain about this, but seriously … there’s too many games right now! Look at them – that’s my stack right now, and I’m not sure when, or if, I can actually work through it. I’m also not sure buying Star Wars: The Old Republic was such an amazing idea, but I have to admit that all things considered, the game is pretty good.

Of course, I might never see much of it anytime soon considering I’m still not remotely through with Skyrim, still have most of Skylanders to play (hey, I spent money on it, so I might as well finish it!) and well, none of the other games is exactly short either. I’m just happy I’m not interested in Batman: Arkham City or that one would be up there as well, taunting me. Actually, I just noticed I forgot to put Anno 2070 on the stack as well. The horror!

Oh well, on the bright side, at least there’s no game drought like in the summer!

The story detailed here is true, but happened a while back. I recount it because I think it’s a good example on why PC gaming isn’t as it should be. I realize it serves little purpose beyond ranting, but it really needs to get out of my system now. Just ignore it if you can’t (under-)stand it.

My girlfriend isn’t a “true gamer” by any means, but she still doesn’t shy away from playing computer games. She’s put more hours into World of Warcraft than most other people – something I’m not entirely sure she can be proud of, but then again, I should certainly not say anything because I did the same – but originally, she discovered computer games through Anno 1602. She bought it as a gift for a kid, and since she didn’t want to give something that’s age inappropriate, she thought she’d at least check the game out for a few minutes. After all, what could possibly go wrong? Of course, that gross underestimation of video game addiction meant that minutes quickly became hours, then days, then a week. Since then, she always spent significant time with the latest version of Anno as soon as they were released, playing at least the entire campaign.

So as usual, she bought Anno 2070 a few days after release and thought she’d spend at least a good weekend with the single player. Sadly, she had to experience what it means to be the neglected part of the gaming community now, and that’s what this little rant is all about. Here’s what happened:

On first launch of the game, she was greeted by a patcher that did neither tell how long it’d take to update, nor how much there was to be downloaded. Of course, being an long-time WoW player, and only having an 1 Mbit connection, she was pretty much used to patches taking absolutely ages to download, so she went to watch TV instead.

Anno 2070 is a great game marred with a terrible publisher.

Over an hour later, the game was finally ready to be played. Creating an U-Play account was required, so with my help, she did just that and finally reached the Ubisoft Launcher. Logging in worked fine, and the game booted into it’s opening cinematic. Oddly enough, she was greeted by yet another login screen right afterwards, and here, her credentials did not seem to do anything except cause an error about the server not answering. Repeated log ins only led to other messages of failure, but not to playing the game. She was confused: “I just want to play the campaign, why do I need to log in?”.

Maybe it was just our connection acting up, as it occasionally had in the past few months? I called my brother, who’d also bought the game, and asked if he was able to log in. No, he was not. He suggested we’d use the offline mode, as it worked for him.

Armed with that knowledge, we indeed found the offline mode hidden away in the depths of the Ubisoft launcher. Alas, it was no help, since the game still asked for a password on the title screen. Apparently, that “offline” mode required one to at least log in once before it actually worked, kind of defeating the purpose. At that point, my girlfriend was more than annoyed. Not being tech-savvy at all, she could not possibly understand why she wasn’t able to play a game she bought with her hard-earned cash just because the copy protection – which should not be a problem on originals – prevented her from doing so. It simply made no sense to her.

Sadly, I had to explain to her that this is more or less normal with PC games today. She’d just never experienced it because WoW was online-only anyway and the older Anno games didn’t come with such rigid protection.

Even though Ubisoft put up all these hoops to jump through, the copy protection isn’t any stronger than the much more hassle-free one they used on Anno 1404. In fact, Anno 2070 was cracked in about the same time as Anno 1404 – 10 days – just that the old protection didn’t actually prevent the legit users from playing their purchased game.

I’m not sure she’ll want to buy the next Anno game now, or any PC game for that matter. Even with the game working fine the day after, the bad experience stuck with her. Of course, you can’t (and shouldn’t) generalize like that, but if that experience for one person, it’s very likely that there’s many more people feeling the same, and I seriously doubt that’s good for business in the end. My girlfriend was lucky to have me considering I could give her at least some technical advice, but I can’t imagine how this looks to someone who doesn’t have the knowledge or help.

Honestly, Ubisoft, why is it always such a hassle with your games? They are mostly spectacular, but I can not wholeheartedly recommend them to anybody thanks to your stupid pirate paranoia. Again, I doubt it’s helping you sell any more copies than without the “protection”, it just pisses people off, and pissed off people might consider if they’d not be better off stealing your games, because that’s much easier than actually getting the legit copies to work. Admittedly, it would have taken one more week to get a copy, but still …

Honestly, even if you don't care for children at all, this is a great deal!

We all should just stop being heartless bastards just for a few minutes and buy the Humble Indie Bundle #4 which includes great games like Cave Story+, Shank and Super Meat Boy. That alone is worth spending a few bucks for, but seriously, think of the children. Afterwards, you can continue to throw away all these annoying charity begging letters you get with the mail every day.

Actually, it’s 36:39 minutes, but who’s counting anyway?! In this video, I’m playing through the first few quests as a bad-ass female Sith Warrior. Includes full narration by yours truly!

In the past years, Activision became what is like the king of plastic peripherals – from Guitar/DJ Hero to Tony Hawk, many games the publisher released required the player to use special hardware in addition to whatever gaming system they were already using. For the mentioned franchises, that made more or less sense, since the peripherals were so integral to the gameplay that the games wouldn’t have been much fun without them. In case of their latest stunt, Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, the reason to require extra gear is clearly less a design aspect than a rather blunt attempt at robbing the player blind.

With the game disc, you get a Portal of Power, a circular platform which connects to your computer (or console) via USB. Also included are three Skylanders figurines with different elemental powers - Trigger Happy, a “tech” Skylander who’s dual wielding golden guns, Gill Grunt, a fish man with a huge spear gun and an affection to water, and Spyro the magic, subtitle giving dragon. To use any of these characters, they need to be put on the Portal of Power; as soon as the figurine is changed, the game instantly swaps to the new character. The cool part about using these plastic figurines is that they all have an RF-ID chip implanted in their base which not only tells the game what character is to be used, but also stores persistent data like experience, gold and gear as well as unlocked skills. Every character needs to be leveled and equipped separately. Leveling up adds a certain amount of life and power, there are hats to be found in treasure chests which grant special stats to the character wearing them, and with the collected gold, skills can be purchased from a fairy as well. Since all these stats are saved inside the figurine, you can transfer them from one game to another, should you so desire. Since the game can be played in local cooperative as well as competitive multiplayer, your imaginary friend can bring his Skylanders to your house and still retain – and increase – their stats. A gimmick, certainly, but quite a nifty idea.

But here’s the catch: there are 32 Skylanders in total, four of each element, and any but the mentioned three needs to be bought separately (or in packs of three, what a bargain). I guess you can already see where this is going, and you are right: while the game can be completed with just the starter pack, you can’t access all areas without having at least one Skylander of each element. Around the world are gates that can only be unlocked by using a character with a certain elemental affinity. This means it’s impossible to 100% the game with the starter pack alone since you need to access all areas to collect all hats, not to mention that there are experience-increasing achievements which require you to own a specific amount of different Skylanders – including several that ask for all 32. By the way, the figurines are locked to their first owner once they come into play, so even if you have a buddy who invested a bit into plastic figurines, he can’t use his Skylanders to unlock your achievement, unless he’d reset ownership of all figures required – but doing so also deletes their stats and gear.

There are also “expansion packs” available that unlock one additional level each (as said before, each level lasts just a few minutes) but at least include some “power objects” that enable stuff like a treasure radar. Of course, these are sold separately at the low, low price of €19,99, making them the most expensive on-disc DLC ever. Yep, on-disc, as none of the unlocked zones even requires an installation or download. To make things even more insane, the additional Skylanders and their special abilities are constantly teased via in-game videos as well.

Oh, hey, I didn’t even mention the game play yet! There’s really nothing wrong with the game itself. It’s a hack-and-slay platformer with very light RPG elements set in a cartoon world. Each level only lasts a few minutes, but there are quite a lot of them with different visual styles, and as mentioned, some areas are cordoned off unless you bring the proper character, so there’s a lot to do if you are so inclined. On top of the normal levels, the first use of each Skylander also unlocks a special “heroic quest”, which is a time limited level with different objectives. The story is the usual kiddie-friendly “loveable cartoon monsters save the world” stuff and hardly worth mentioning, but the writing is fun, voice acting is agreeable as well, and lots of the adventure is told in pre-rendered and rather pretty cut scenes between the levels.

Overall though, the graphics look like they were originally made for the Wii, with no anti-aliasing, very low poly-count and no real draw distance. What’s worse though is that the PC version suffers from an incredibly shaky frame rate as soon as a map is a bit larger – even with such a short view distance, the game starts to crawl even on a powerful computer. Also, I found the game to briefly pause every few seconds as soon as the PC is not connected to the internet. These hiccups completely disrupted game play to an extent that it became unplayable. As soon as internet service was restored, the freezes were entirely gone. I have no idea why Skylanders would even need an internet connection in the first place since it doesn’t have any online features at all. On first launch, the Windows firewall asked for permission to let it access the network alright, so I guess there must be some devious intent behind it and we should all cry like little girls and boycott it like its Origin or whatnot.

At least I didn't have to pay extra to make the Portal of Power work as it should.

With all the additional hardware required, one might think that’s enough of a copy protection, but no: the PC version actually uses Securom as well, forcing you to keep the disc inserted while playing. Considering there’s no way to even start the game without the Portal of Power, let alone play it without the Skylanders figurines, this feels pretty ridiculous and speaks volumes of the business behind this game. Sadly, the hardware isn’t without it’s faults either, as the Portal of Power thingy didn’t want to recognize my figurines at all times. The water dude wasn’t even accepted at all, unless it was held about a centimeter above the portal. Of course, you can’t really do that, since you need both hands for the controller, so I did the next best thing and used the DVD case as a prop-up, which worked perfectly and actually increased recognition rate to 100% at all times.

Despite the poor graphics and shoddy frame rate, Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure brings an unique and original idea to the table and is indeed quite enjoyable – as long as you are able and/or willing to look past the insane cash requirement to unlock all the content. For the starter pack and all separate characters, you’d be shelling out €290 to €300 depending on the platform of choice. Even if you don’t bother with buying all of the characters and just want to see all parts of the game, you’re still looking at €95 to €105 – quite a steep amount for any game. Considering the target audience usually still has to learn the value of money, I’m not entirely sure if it makes for such a great gift – at least not if you are the unfortunate (grand-)parent who has to endure the whine for additional unlockables at €8 a pop. Even if it doesn’t win any other prizes, Skylanders easily claims the trophy for the most ridiculous cash grab of 2011.