Double-header: FFXIV and LoL

I recently got into the beta of Final Fantasy 14 and gave League of Legends another try. I decided to write some reviews.

FFXIV- This game is still in beta, and I'm sure that they will optimize the graphics speed for the various video cards "soon" (because as of right now, even with a very good system, the graphics are very unresponsive), so I'm trying to not hold this against them. I'm also going to try to pretend that they didn't simply take the exact races/models from FF11 and relabel them and try to pawn them off as "new" races. The old races weren't 100% terrible. Oh, I'm going to give them a pass for the pathetic enemies that we have to fight too, since it's almost Final Fantasy-ey to have that kind of mobs. Not that I'm not bothered by fighting rabid bunnies with a party of 5 level 20s. I mean seriously, the only other place I've ever seen a bunny be threatening was Monty Python, which wasn't going for seriousness.

If I could ignore all those problems, the game could still be passable. But the biggest problem is the interface and controls. The game is built from the ground up to be used with a game pad! This is just terrible, because gamepads are only good when a mouse+keyboard are not available. So much loss of precision, and mashing tab over and over until you happen to be in range of what you're trying to target (and for some reason, tab picks the target right of center, and goes left-to right until it wraps around to just-left of center being the last in the cycle) only to have hit the button so many times that we skip over and have to tab through everything again. Yeah, I think shift-tab backs up a target, but why fight over table scraps? There's no reason to do something so idiotic when simply using the mouse to click what you want to target is 2,000 times better.

The follow camera lags behind, as if we're tethered to a balloon that eventually gets around to floating into approximately the right position. This is just terrible and makes me feel like I'm playing a game on a console with a game pad (/shrug.... again, we could fight over table scraps, but mouse+keyboard is clearly superior to gamepads) which isn't capable of the precision necessary to use an immediate-reaction camera following scheme.

Toggling in and out of combat still takes about 2 seconds, and your character has to stop moving, equip or unequip his weapon, and then ready to continue moving. This gets really obnoxious when you forget you're already in combat mode, run up to a mob (with the terrible control scheme) only to go out of combat, and then have to go back into combat, oh crap accidentally hit tab have to cycle through all the targets again. Crap that bunny walked through me ugh now I have to try and get this dilapidated camera control to move 180 degrees so I can see that stupid bunny that walked under me so I can tab it and hit the "target lock" button (which wouldn't even be necessary with a mouse+keyboard setup, which is 100% superior to gamepads). The game ends up feeling like doing my chores, only in doing so I haven't actually put the laundry into the washer or taken out the trash. Though we may as well just put FFXIV into the trash.

LoL. This is all I have to say about League of Legends. Yes, they obviously knew their game's acronym was laugh out loud, which is what you should do for this game. Let's pretend that the heroes aren't annoying, juvenile, cartoony, and/or cliche, because stylistically they could have just been trying to be different. But eventually all the classes end up seeming about the same. Then I just start feeling like my hero is running in place because everyone in the game moves so slow. The only potentially good thing about this game is that they have a stat called +ability power that allows spell damage to scale (a potential "issue" of DoTA / HoN is that the agility-based classes scale into terrors by endgame, where int/str don't) into endgame. In theory this should be a good thing, but in actuality this just seems to force all of the heroes into farm/carry mode, and instead of anything exciting happening, everyone just farms up for endgame, which never ends up being very satisfying. Essentially LoL is just EM (easy mode) Heroes of Newerth, plus about a suck factor of 500.

Let's just say we ignored all those negative aspects because the game is still fun, and HoN guys are just too hardcore. LoL is for casuals, right? Well, the free to play model fails. Sure, they rotate in 10 or so heroes every week, and then if you have favorites you can drop some real money to purchase the ability to have the rights to play the heroes (which all suck, by the way). You don't have to spend real money, because for playing games, and especially winning games, you get special points that you can accumulate to buy your heroes for "free". This aspect really sucks, because after as many games as I could manage- I think I won 5 of 8 games, I still didn't have enough points for one of the "cheap" heroes. Cheap being 1350 points. I think I ended up with 900 points or so. However, the "cool" heroes cost more like 6000 "free" points, which is what, a weeks straight of winning? And I have to do this with the epicly retarded heroes of the week?

If you still haven't decided this games deserves the trash can, if you calculate how much real money you would have to spend to buy all of the heroes, it would probably be $100 or so (oh, and you can buy special skins! The skins cost real money too!) to just buy the heroes straight up. If you do buy all these heroes, which end up all playing very similarly to each other, and have really lame game voices, you're still going to be playing a bunch of nubs who didn't want to drop $30 up front to play Heroes of Newerth either, and are still just using the weekly heroes. Plus, the hero picking method doesn't prevent both teams from picking the same hero. There's nothing more lame than laning against a mirror. It takes all strategy out and just turns the game into a brute-force and skill match. Ever play starcraft as Terran vs Terran? Yeah, it's really lame.

I'm not even going to recommend you to play LoL casually for a while and then switch over to HoN, because LoL sucks. I'm just going to say, play HoN, maybe watch some casts at honcast.com, and don't waste your time with LoL.

Synergy by hotkeys

So I got annoyed a few times with Synergy, because I don't always want the edge of the screen to switch to the other monitor. I figured out how to remedy this.

In Synergy setup, there is a section for hotkeys. One option is to switch to screen___. I think this is cool! However, if I got rid of the screen mappings, synergy doesn't allow that computer to login to the service. I found that if I map 0-0 from one screen to 0-0 of the other, I effectively disable the edge-of-screen swaps, but can still swap screens through hotkey. Pretty cool!

Steam

Steam is basically like Itunes for computer games. It's really awesome! No longer do I have to worry about going to the store and keeping track of my license keys for all my games. I just remember my Steam login. There is the negative side in that I have to have internet access in order to play games, but Steam has servers that let me install any of my games onto any computer that I login to steam with.

If those were the only reason to use steam (store.steampowered.com), we would still have a decent product. However, the biggest, keystone reason to use Steam is that they have crazy sales! Usually anywhere from 33% off to 50%, and sometimes 75% or even 95% sales. I just don't see myself ever paying full price again, when I can pay 1/4 of sticker.

Console ports to PC

Yeah, so I know my blog is called cool stuff, but this time I'm talking about cool stuff by omission. A video game pretty much has about a 95% chance to be a waste of my time and money if it's a port from a console game. They always hack together a piece of garbage with crappy controls and that crashes all the time in an attempt to make me waste my money. It angers me so much!

Review: The Black Company by Glen Cook

So I read all four black company books, or I guess you could say all 10, since they have now been re-packaged into trilogies / dualogies(?). It was a very entertaining series, and Glen Cook definitely is able to build an interesting world with very interesting characters, and interesting plot lines. I would have to say this is the first epic fantasy that I also epicly loved the characters!

The first trilogy is probably the best-written trilogy ever. It was completely engaging and probably the most fun I have ever had with a trilogy. He really did a good job coming up with his own lore (if he did copy someone else, I didn't recognize the similarities) that was almost familiar, yet completely not. He handles magic in a way that just really makes sense! The military "with the guys" feeling really put me into the story and made it very believable.

Glen has this habit of putting you in the point of view of a peon in the operation. When that person becomes more important, he puts you in someone else's perspective.

I'm a little torn, because while the first trilogy was the most incredible book ever, and the 2nd trilogy was also very epic, unfortunately books 7-9 (duology and a half) totally bogged down, and the tenth book just felt like he was ready to wrap it up. I will definitely recommend that you read the first trilogy though, and make your own decision from that point on. If you find yourself unable to get enough of the world you should definitely keep reading, and you REALLY get to feel the pain of time passing (I honestly started feeling a bit depressed myself at times). He really drew me in.

Anyway, first trilogy is a 10, the next trilogy somewhere between 8.5 to 9.5 depending on the fact that it leads in to the next two duologies, and the next books really ARE written well, but he so effectively built such an awesome world that I couldn't help but feel a little bit letdown yet also somewhat satisfied in the somewhat satisfying ending. I have to say that this must be because the journey was so well done.

I really really want to tell you details on what makes this book so good and the reasons that I think parts of it could have been better, but I don't want to post spoilers. I recommend that you read the first book and make your own decision.

Oh, the series is a bit gothicly dark, so if your favorite part of LOTR is re-reading the parts about elf cities you may not be into this.

This guy from Amazon says it a lot better than I could, and I totally agree with him: link

Sorry if you liked this one...

Apparently a lot of people love the Green Rider. A few people really don't. Unfortunately I think I am with the smaller group. I'm only on page 87, and even the people who liked it have said that it doesn't "pick up" until page 100. One reviewer even said that it didn't get interesting until the 2nd half.

Anyway, this is how I'm feeling right now: Amazon Crit but I plan to make it through this book (as long as I don't have any other books to read momentarily). At least I found one other person as frustrated as I, and now I can feel a little better and try to keep reading.

My big gripe is that the premise (she has to deliver a message to the king) should be more of a side-note that leads into the "real" issue, which would be the actual story with conflict and other "epic" things such as these villains hinted at. Even Incarceron (which, by the way, is a really good book... minus maybe 80 pages or so that were "ok") which aims to be more of a few-and-true fantasy, ends up being epicer than the Green Rider without even trying.

Of course, I may come back and modify this if I can ever get through the rest of the book.

Maybe I'll go write some reviews on books that I enjoyed reading so I don't just seem entirely negative. I guess I was too busy enjoying them to worry about writing a review.

/begin rant (highlight if you really wanna see it)

I mean seriously, these awesome green riders, who are famous for being messengers??!! When push comes to shove, do we call in the green riders? No, what about Ghostbusters? I think we would have to call in either the local militia or He-man, since the green-riders specialize in running away, and getting the message to the king who, obviously, is going to fix all our problems. Or will just die anyway, because the villains are obviously really scary, and the green riders all ran off.

Plus giant eagles, plus cliched named villains, plus a less-cooler version of galadriel, plus a less-cooler version of Shelob. At least the horse is unique. Oh wait, guess not.

(I'm perfectly willing to eat my words later)

Dawn of War 2

During my rant about how bad Starcraft 2 is, a friend of mine told me that Dawn of War 2 is so much better. And that it's awesome. So I downloaded the demo from Steam for free, and played it, and it's seriously the best game I've played in the past 5 years.

The best part is that DoW2 is modeled after Warhammer 40,000, which is pretty much the best Wargame-system in the world. Space marines, Orks, space elves, big ugly bugs—what more could you ask for? Guns maybe? Well, so far all of the space marines have guns, and usually they are big.

"Daddy, I want to play Dawn of ward 2". Oh yeah? Why? "I like guns".

So, I let him "play" by sitting on my lap and watching me play. Then he says "I want to be the guy with the guns". And I say "Well, they all have guns".

DoW2 got rid of one of the most annoying parts of the game, which building a base. Sure, base building can be kind of interesting, but usually you have to spend at least as much time playing base manager as you do actually playing the game. Well, as fun as it is to WAIT for my stupid buildings to build, and for my stupid harvester guys to go get more minerals, I'd honestly just spend my time PLAYING the game. You know, shooting the orcs/bugs/spaceelves with all the guns. Also, Grenades, Rocket launchers, demo charges, and JET PACKS! Yeah, it's just awesome. I'm just going to say, don't waste $180 on Starcraft 2 (or any money on Blizzard junk in general—they're just not doing anything cool lately) and get a good game!