The Blog
Okay so the first thing I would like to say is that I am very very sorry for having such a delay time in between blogs, a lot of thing happened this past week. Now I know that this is no excuse and I need to be more serious about you guys. Also I now have a plan for the blog, I will do 10 blogs to see how things are picking up, and if I want to do this continually. If I decide to I will do an official introduction blog and hopefully start doing things more seriously. Also I think that I will try to write a new blog every 2-4 days, so be looking forward to that.
Modeling and Mods
So yesterday i realized that i had no models for the blog because ive been so busy, so i stayed up until 2:30 last night modeling, and chatting with my friend Josh (Dr. Jeckle). I decided to make a battle axe type model because i love playing with them in Mount and Blade: Warband. It took me about an hour or so to do because i had to keep redoing the blade. I could never get it to look right. Also i worked on prop modeling and created a pop can and a pylon, they are both somewhat simple models but i think they turned out quite nice.
And a little inside info: There has been some talk about starting a Half Life 2 mod amongst my friends, we really don't have anything yet but if we do decide to do it then I of course am overflowing with ideas.
Life
The reason I have been so busy recently is because my hockey coach...passed away last Monday. You see, in Canada we are stereotypically hockey fanatics, and for some people like myself its true. So you might have been thinking oh it was just his coach, but my hockey team, well to put it simply we did everything together. We went to restaurants, hotels, over to each others house, and just generally were like long time friends.
My coach was 36 when he passed, and he left behind 3 boys, 6 year old twins Jared and Drake, and 13 year old Nick. And of course his loving wife Jennifer. We will always miss you Chris and we pray for your family.
Gaming
This week I was focused on playing all of the free steam games. They are Forsaken World, Global Agenda, War Inc. Battlezone, Spiral Knights, Alliance of Valiant Arms, and Champions Online. Oh and Team Fortress 2 but I've had that for years and it doesn't really count.
-Forsaken World: I am not a very big RPG player anymore, but I have to say this was one of the slowest RPG's I have played for a while, I think I played until I was level 16 then I just stopped it was boring and slow and it held your hand way too much. It was too easy to kill anything and it wasn't very exciting. I would give it a 2 out of 5 because it wasn't absolutely terrible, but not exciting and way too easy.
- Global Agenda: This game was extremely fun, and the jet pack mechanics, I spent a lot of time just fooling around with it. Unfortunately the game was very short and it ended abruptly. I think I was at about level 21 when I got bored of the pvp. Basically what happens is you run through the story doing quests and missions like in Guild Wars. Then when you think you are really good and you really really want to play more, the game's story just stops, and your expected to play pvp until you are level 30 and then join the games clan or guilds called agencies and do even more pvp. Now there is a co-op pve option but its is so repetitive, and there are like 4 missions for each skill level. So after 2 or 3 levels with my character which are by the way relatively hard to get off of doing the co-op and pvp, I gave up and moved on. Overall the game was very fun and well made and I would give it a 4 out of 5.
-War Inc Battlezone: I have mixed feelings for this game it was really fun and well made and you can really tell that the developers care because there is an update almost every single day. But on the other side this game needs more balancing. The snipers really ruin the game and unfortunately but now surprisingly most people play sniper, they're are extremely OP and end up being stronger than anyone in the game. Also I have been made aware that they fixed this but you can see all enemies on the mini map ruining any stealth or skilled approach. The last thing that I found bad about this game was that the skills only worked half the time and it was very frustrating because I bought a skill with the "gold coins" (which is the payer money) that I got at each level. I could have used the coins to get a good gun permanently but instead bought a skill that only works half the time. This game was very fun and addicting and really there are only minor things to fix but its not perfect yet so I will give it a 4 out of 5 and I may continue to play this game for a while, and hopefully they will make those fixes..
-Spiral Knights: Unfortunately I can't really review Spiral Knights because unfortunately I got stuck in the tutorial camp. You see there was this guy and he had I think 4 little bubbles of text, and I just got tired of reading them and skipped them. Little did i know that you acctully had to read those to figure out where to go, so I ended up using this machine like elevator thing to do some sort of dungeon fighting but I really couldn't figure out what to do after that.
-Alliance of Valiant Arms: This game was a complete counter-strike clone, and it wasn't very thought through in my opinion. I think this because if I am to kill one guy head-to-head it takes me down to low hp and I am killed almost instantly if I try to go into another firefight and it kind of ruins the whole feel of the game. Another thing that I hated was the snipers, again developers really have to be careful about having snipers in a game, because a lot of the time all of the noobs go and just play sniper because they are OP and easy to use. The worst is when almost everyone is a sniper and I try to advance then as Doug would say it "BOOM HEAD SHOT" and there is really nothing I can do about it. I only played this one for a little while but I did like the tank game mode where you have to kill or escort the tank, but I'm pretty sure thats from Enemy Territory: Front Lines at least thats where I first saw it, I bet theres a game that did it before though. There wasnt really a lot of bad things about this game but there wasnt really very good things about it either so I will give it a 2.5 out of 5.
-Champions Online: This game was a little too repetitive for my likings, and it seems to be geared towards team or friend play. Unfortunately we only have one computer good enough to run this in my house so I couldn't play with my brother, and non of my friends would play with me so I went solo. The game was fun in the tutorial but when I got to the main city I did all of the kill the new purple gang quests but there were so many of the same quest it just wasn't very fun, I may go back to the game and try again because I really really enjoyed it up until it got repetitive. It did hold your hand a lot but I thought they did it in a good way because you didn't have to use the auto attack and there was blocking so if you wanted to you could use skill. But as I said earlier if you want to play this you might want to get a friend because the enemies were pretty tough to take on solo at some parts of the game, then again you could just grind A LOT. The story was half decent and was easy to follow the maps were huge and the movement skill mechanics (like you could fly or jump super high or do the spider man things with webs) really allowed you to morph your own playingstyle and superhero. This game really did have its moments and I don't want to give it a perfect score but it was really close so I will give it a 4.5 out of 5 because it wasn't perfect but I really enjoyed the game.
So those are my reviews of the free steam games, I hope you enjoyed reading this blog, and I need to apologize again for 2 things. Firstly I am going to apologize again for posting this blog so late. But also I would like to apologize for uploading the pictures of my models before and after posting this blog, I had uploaded the pictures, and wrote out the entire blog except this last paragraph then I had to go to work so I didn't have time to edit it, so basically when I got home my brother was on until well now, when I am uploading this. Thank you for putting up with me and my weird life.
Mini Ace, out.
