A year old!

It just dawned on me today that the blog must be a year old by now, checking back on the posts it seems I was right, officially we a year and and 18 days old! I know that I've have been neglecting things around here a bit in recently months but I can't believe that it's been going for that long.

Here's to many more!

Alpha Testers Guide Appears Online

A lot of information has been leaked regarding the current Alpha testing phase of Final Fantasy XIV thanks to http://ffxivjourney.blogspot.com/

It seems to be all the information that Square Enix passed out to the current testers to help them along with playing. There are also a few videos to check out which reveals a bit more information about how things are going to play out.

First things first, it looks like one of my main fears has happened, something that was a main problem for me in FFXI. I didn't see any mouse movement while using the menu systems which suggests that, like XI, you'll have to use keys rather than a cursor to navigate through them. This is something that really annoyed me and it was very close to being a game breaker in XI.

Another thing that I did notice and I wasn't really surprised was the "invisible walls" which is a big issue in all Square Enix games has reared it's head here too. Places where you expect to be able to walk or fall down is really a wall. It seems to be an accepted practice for them which is why I wasn't surprised.

I also wasn't surprised that it doesn't look like the player will be able to jump either :(

I still have high hopes for the game, this is only alpha footage which is very obvious so it's almost expected that we'll see a lot of changes.

Make sure you check out http://ffxivjourney.blogspot.com/ for all the information, if some of the videos don't work, as I suspect they won't once Square Enix gets wind of them, you can see the majority of the information here on Kotaku

Is the iPad worth it?

It seems like every tech site on the internet is covering the imminent launch of the iPad which for those of you in America is only a few hours away. I've been keeping an eye on the news in the last few days and I've read some of the reviews so I've decided to weigh in and give my opinion on the matter.

I'd be lying if I hadn't thought about ordering an iPad for myself, I've been quietly waiting for Microsofts Courier to be officially announced and released since it was leaked last year and as of right now the iPad is probably the closest thing to that, but I've been burned by Apple before which is why I've decided to wait. I got caught up in the hype of the iPhone when it originally launched back in 2008 and picked one up.

The phone was epic for it's multi-touch gestures and accelerometer but that was it really, no app store, poor iTunes connectivity and very buggy software. A year later they released the 3G and then the 3GS slowly adding new things. If they'd have released the 3G/S first, I probably wouldn't be writing this now. That is why I'm going to wait because I'm sure the same thing is going to happen with the iPad too.

Apple made a huge mistake not allowing flash support on this device. I think they got away with it on the iPhone (barely I might add) because it was a mobile phone but the iPad is supposed to be a Tablet PC. Apple have effectively blocked a good chunk of the internet thanks to this move, something which has downright stopped me from ordering one. I've seen some of the tech demos out there for HTML5 and it really is looking impressive but until it takes off and becomes widespread, the iPad is missing something too big to ignore. It's my opinion that the only reason Apple choose to block Flash is because of it's development capabilities. Why would you bother going through the process of getting your application approved by Apple when you could just post it online with Flash and let people use it that way?

I know a lot of people will tell you that Apple products are ridiculously overpriced and that you're paying for the brand name, not the actual product and they're right, $500 is a lot of money for what is, in reality a glorified iPhone/Touch XL. My main reason behind considering one is the application development, something I will definitely be playing around with in the near future and the possibilities open up even more with an iPhone XL, more space to do cool things.

In the end though I will be waiting until the iPad G or whatever the next iteration is going to be called comes out some time next year with the improvements and lower price tag before I think about getting it again, maybe by that time the Courier will be released.

So is the iPad worth it? No.

Official Final Fantasy XIV YouTube Channel is up!

Square Enix have opened up a Final Fantasy XIV YouTube channel which can be found here

There's only one video up at the moment but it's full of new gameplay (new to me anyway!)

The video brought back a lot of memories of FFXI to me. I think with the races being the same in both games, it just all seems very familiar but new at the same time. The locations shown in the video looked very promising, everything looked very grand and with what I'm imagining will be the theme song to the game being played in the background I'm sure it will be epic.

Unfortunately I had no clue what they were talking about but thanks to ZAM you can get the translation here

I hope that the game is still set for release this year, I'm definitely looking forward to getting my hands on it

See you soon STO

Star Trek Online has been a success, at least in the eyes of Atari and Cryptic Studios. I don't think the same thing would be said by a vast majority of the initial player base, myself included. I don't think it's a failure, but it definitely needs some work!

The game has been launched nearly 2 months now and while Cryptic are still pushing out content updates like the recently released Season One which adds new PvP maps, more missions and a few other things you can find out about here

I've decided to cancel my subscription to the game for a while. My reason is being is that I can't justify the cost of a monthly subscription when there's so little to do. While the first taskforce mission was a lot of fun to play, in reality (for the moment anyway) it's the only real piece of endgame content available.

Another reason, which might not have played a part in my original decision to cancel the subscription, has definitely helped me in not regretting it. Charging real cash for in-game items. Aka - Microtransactions. I've made my opinions clear on the MT subject and they've officially become a reality today. Charging $4 dollars so you can create 2 more character is ridiculous. While I can understand stupid cosmetic things like new uniforms or bridge layouts, charging you to make more characters??

It's always been my opinion for an MMO that the first thing the developer should be concerned about is how they're going to keep people playing the game. Allowing the player to create more characters so they can play as different classes or factions usually does the trick for a while, it gives the developer enough time to build on it's existing end-game content. Cryptic, in their infinite wisdom decided to only give 3 character slots (5 if you bought the lifetime subscription)

I think it's very cheeky to ask a player to pay a fee on top of a monthly subscription for a slot to make a new character, something I think Cryptic (and any other company that does it) should be very ashamed of. I don't care that more characters take up extra server space. This is why you pay a monthly subscription in the first place!

In the end it's the long time/loyal player base who are the ones being targeted here. A new player isn't going to worry about multiple slots, retraining options and god knows whatever other ideas they come up with, it's the end-game players who need to consider them which is eventually what happens. I think as long as Cryptic keep game changing items out of the C-Store, people are most likely just going to accept these charges, but if Cryptic do cross that line...Game Over

I know I sound very harsh, that just goes to show how strongly I feel about it I guess but I don't want to say I'm finished with game forever because it's not true. You'll never see me using the C-Store, if they can continue to add more missions and new types of end-game content I would definitely come back to play them, but until then I'll watch from the sidelines so I don't miss anything and wait for the right time to come back.

Final Fantasy XIII Review Scores

I've been certain for the last few years that it's very hard to trust the scores that websites and magazines give to high profile games, simply because I'm convinced they are payed off in some sense to give it favorable reviews. Today IGN wrote what I thought was a very fair review and gave it a score it deserved. Unfortunately they picked a game I had the high hopes for to give a low score.

I've already had people come back at me with saying that 8.3 isn't a bad score for a game. Normally I would agree; A lot of people and a lot of developers would be happy to get above 8 but I don't think there has been a numbered Final Fantasy that has ever gone below 9 on its first-time review (remakes don't count!) which what upsets me I guess.

From what I've gathered, there isn't really a "Bad Guy" like Sephiroth. There aren't any NPC's to interact with and no towns to explore. Basically, it seems like they took out all the RPG elements (much like Bioware did to ME2) and have made it more of an action game.

Yeah I know this post doesn't really have a point, you might say that this is my way of venting on the subject. I just read EDGE's review and they gave it a 5/10. Stating the same issues I mentioned above :(

The game isn't out till Tuesday and I'll definitely be picking it up regardless of bad reviews. I just hope that I enjoy it as much as I have the others in the franchise, it can't be much worse than Final Fantasy X-2....can it?



Expect a review once I get my hands on it!

STO Suggestions

So STO launched about 2 weeks ago, I was going to write a review but I don't think it's really possible to fully review a game which is never meant to end, so instead of that, I'm going to give my suggestions to make the game better.

Ditch the Memory Alpha Crafting System
I hate to come off like I'm being mean for no reason, but whoever thought that Memory Alpha was a good idea needs a good kick up the arse. Cryptic have never been very good with crafting, Champions Online has suffered the same fate and City of Heroes/Villains is no better off either.

One thing that people have been begging for pretty much since Cryptic took over development was a full and interesting crafting system and while there is Tribble breeding for the Federation, what we really want is to craft consoles and weapons.

More Scripted Episodes
Right now I'm only a second grade Captain in-game and I've heard that content can get very thin towards the Admiral rank, my experiences as a Commander were pretty bad, I found myself with no missions other than the repeatable Cluster and Deep Space Encounter ones. While procedurally generated content is good for filling in gaps, it is in no way a replacement for scripted missions. Some of the "Episodes" have been amazing, it really did feel like being in an episode of Star Trek, while the procedural content is fairly boring. (Does anyone else notice that the Galaxy seems to be overrun by lava bleeding trees??)

Raid Groups and Missions!
I can only speak for myself, but I'm sure there are a lot of other people out there who hate the Crystalline Entity with a passion thanks to being grouped with morons who don't pay attention. Cryptic really need to implement raid grouping, so that Fleets can group together and take on Fleet Actions privately. So far, the only real benefit to joining a Fleet has been to use a Fleet Bank and have the use of a fleet channel. It seems that the new "Raidisodes" being released soon are still only 5-man instances which is very disappointing.

Speed Ground Combat up again!
During Beta, Ground Combat was fast and furious, until they decided to try and slow it down to keep with more traditional MMO pace. I personally prefer it faster, for a sci-fi MMO I think it needs to feel like everything is happening quickly, as it would in a real gun-fight, having to wait for a 1 second cooldown between shots just feels wrong.

Tweak Exchange
I'd like to see more options on the exchange. I think they need to add sub-sections to the weapons tab so that we can search for turrets, cannons, phasers, distrupters individually. As it stands now you need to know the name of an item to search for it. New players specifically aren't going to know whats going on (I know I didn't anyway)

Conclusion
I can't think of any MMO that hasn't suffered from problems during launch (Yes, even World of Warcraft!) so it would be unfair to say that STO isn't living up to my expectations. I plan on giving Cryptic another month or two before I make any final decisions on whether I'll renew my subscription, if they were to implement some of my suggestions above, I think it'd go a long way to making the game as popular as it deserves to be.

Mass Effect 2 Review

I could literally sum this up in a sentence, actually in a word. Epic. Bioware are blessed to have such a great writing staff on hand because their last few games have been amazingly pieced together with great stories and Mass Effect 2 is no different.

I don't want to spoil the game for anyone so I'll try my best to keep them out.

The Good

• Amazing Storyline

The story was mind blowing to me, it's so much darker than the first and basically begs for the sequel without leaving the player not satisfied.

• Improved Game Mechanics

Bioware have been saying from the beginning that they went back and retooled everything based on player feedback from the first game and it's hard not to see their work. The aiming and guns feel a lot better and more responsive and accurate.

The conversation system has been completely upgraded now to include Paragon/Renegade actions as well as good guy/bad guy conversations. Some of them are really amazing. I think this is the closest they've come to morality and hopefully they can only improve on it for the next game.

• More interesting characters

While Mass Effect 1 had a good crew, the crew of the 2nd are 10x better. They feel more real and I found myself actually wanting to hear what they all had to say instead of just trying to chat up the women (which I did too naturally :P)

• Better side quests

I didn't do a lot of side quests in Mass Effect 1 because they weren't really all that interesting, I guess it's something that Bioware worked on too because they are a lot more impressive in this and some of them could have been a main story in itself.

The Bad
Unfortunately there are some bad parts to the game, most of which isn't really the fault of Bioware but more a platform issue. I can only speak for the Xbox 360 version which is what I played.

• RPG elements are gone

I wonder if EA had anything to do with this. A lot of the RPG elements that made up the first game have either been removed or extremely toned down. Less abilities to level up, health system changed to rechargeable shield system and no visible stats for weapons and only minimal stats on armor.

• Bring back the old UI!

Along with removing the RPG stuff, they've also changed the UI. I can only speak for myself but the I found it nearly impossible to keep track of my teams health. They were either getting hit or dead and I usually only noticed they were dead if they let out a scream. The mail system was a nightmare to go through, sometimes it would skip over buttons, or sometimes it'd be impossible to read the mail since the right stick was too sensitive to scroll through them.

• Loading times

A lot of people were very frustrated by extremely long elevator rides from the first game so Bioware decided to take them out, now instead of looking at extremely long elevator rides, we just get extremely long animated wallpapers. At one point in the game I was having trouble and kept dying which would have been fine except that the game had to load for 40-60 seconds each time it happened which was a nightmare.

• Framerate issues

Thankfully Bioware managed to get rid of the Unreal Engines mascot aka texture popping for this one but there was one major problem towards the end of the game. The framerate of the game goes to 15-17 frames a second at certain sections of the last boss. There was also a problem with the ending cutscene. It switches between pre-rendered and in-game scenes every few seconds which made the pre-rendered scenes stutter when they started.

The Verdict
There are very little problems with Mass Effect and the problems I listed really were only an Xbox problem (I never thought to install the game at the time so next playthrough I'll be doing that to test if those framerate issues are still there) but the game itself storywise and gameplay-wise make it a must have game. I simply can't wait for the third game which is hopefully not that far away. I just hope they take another stab at the UI and maybe add back some of the RPG elements.

Score: 9.5/10

What I've been up to

As some of you might know, I'm currently stuck at home with tonsillitis. I've taken the time to overhaul a few things and make some plans to upgrade my home network.

As I mentioned in my last post I've finally figured out that damn problem with the mixed up " and @ keys which has made working on the Mac so much easier. I know it sounds like such a stupid thing but when you've spent 10 years with them that way, it's hard to break the habit!

I used to think Mac's were crap but I've come around to them now and I actually really like the OS but unfortunately there are some Windows only programs that I need to do my work. I was using Bootcamp for a while but it was such a nightmare having to reboot and switch between the both. I'm currently testing out VMware Fusion 3 which so far has been working wonders, I've used Virtual PC before so I knew the drill. The most important thing though is VMware supports 3D acceleration which I need for some of the applications I use for college work.

I installed Windows XP and got each of the programs working without any issues.

I'm currently planning out a home server for the house. I'd like to be able to stream content all over the house without having to leave my computer on, I'm currently leaning towards using Windows Home Server for the OS and using spare parts from old computers I've picked up over the years. From what I've read it will run well (as long as I don't plan on streaming HD content straight away) on the parts I've got. The major thing I need to invest in is storage space for backups and hosting my media.

Last but not least I've discovered two amazing things (one thanks to my cousin, the other thanks to Google) Groove Shark and Mozilla Prism.

Groove Shark is basically the YouTube equivalent for the internet radio industry. It runs much like Last.fm but instead of charging you to listen to the music, they let you listen for free but offer VIP services that gets rid of some annoying ads and offers you a bigger library. So far I haven't had any problems finding a song I like.

One thing I really hate is having to keep Firefox open for web applications so Prism is like a godsend to me. It lets you make a stand alone program out of web applications that can collapse to the taskbar. It means that if your browser crashes (as they do) the radio or game you are using isn't going to crash with it. I highly recommend checking it out.

So that's what I've been up to the last few days. Mass Effect 2 tomorrow and then STO next week. Those plus college is going to keep me very busy!

I love solving old problems!

Something that has always annoyed me about using the macbook is that the " and @ signs were always mixed up. Apparently Apple doesn't know what an Irish keyboard layout is. I spent hours looking for a solution to it, apparently one guy made some kind of hotfix for it but I couldn't get it working. I've also seen guides on setting up custom keystrokes to fix it but nothing really worked.

Today my friends I've finally found the solution. For some reason I decided to start looking around for a fix again today and funnily enough it was one of the first pages I checked.

I had to download an additional keyboard layout (from Microsoft) which switched them around properly.

I've also installed VMware so I can get back to work with my Java and HTML work.