Gaming
eRepublik: The New World
Have you ever wished that you could live your life all over again? I have!
The idea behind eRepublik is that you can create an account and live it day to day as you would in real life. Boring? Nah.
After inital sign up you’re forced to pick a job and horrible wages and work. Sucky? For now. After you work two days you’ll level and get something a little better as well as join the army and train. At level 5 (I think it was 5) you can participate in any wars your country is in. Eventually you can vote for political parties and what not as well.
Personally I’m still pretty newb at this, but looking into the future of the game with user-created political parties, different countries and regions and fluctuating economies it can hold a lot of potential. A key factor that interests me is that the game is based on real-time logic, so those with more time on their hands won’t overrun the game.
I’d recommend to give it a try for a week or so, see how it plays out. I like the idea of being able to represent my region. Look me up while you’re there, name is Egen.
Games: No More Heroes
Right off the bat, this game is SO not a kids game. If anything, No More Heroes
UBI Soft’s No More Heroes’ gameplay is a typical beat ‘em up, but with a very adult-oriented theme. Instead of trying to save a princess, you’re killing other assassins so that you can be number one. That’s it. Along the way, you’re forced to do odd jobs like collect coconuts and mow lawns to earn money so that you can enter the battle against the next ranked assassin. This keeps the game from getting too boring too quick. (Imagine his resume: Travis Touchdown, Assassin and part-time lawn mower)
The style of this game is strange at first glance as it seems to have a choppy-anime’ish look. After around 15 minutes or so, they seem to smooth out and you realize how incredibly amazing the look of this game really is. The dialoge between characters in the cinematic scenes are fantastic and incredibly witty. However, during the game the taunts get quite repetitive, and could use some fine tuning (even if that just means being removed completely).
The controls are generally just push the button or hold the button down to attack. You can either attack with punch/kick and wrestling moves (B) or with your bean katana (A). an interesting twist on the controls though is that for wrestling moves you have to move the wiimote and nunchuck in the same direction to do the attack. Also with the beam katana when in a draw, you draw circles to win it. It’s strange, but to be expected for the Nintendo Wii. Overall fairly easy controls to get used to.
One of the coolest things about this game is that he has a cell phone. Whenever you get a call on his phone, your wiimote vibrates. When you push the button to answer it, the voice (other person on the phone) comes through on the wiimore speaker, not the TV speakers. So you actually have to hold the wiimote up to the side of your head. Strange? Yes. Entertaining? You betcha!
Though only about 1/3 of the way through the plot, I’m having one problem with this game when it comes to the missions. If a mission is failed, you can not simply ‘retry’, you have to go all the way back to where the mission was picked up, get it again, then go try the mission once more. This is frustrating when it takes you 10 minutes to travel between the two locations. Though the missions are pretty easy for the most part, it would be nice if they didn’t waste my time with the odd one that I mess up on.
The game is fairly cheap to pick up (Amazon has it for $20) so might be worth adding to your collection. Given that 95% of the games currently out for the Wii are targeted at family/children this is a nice change. I’d recommend it if not just to be able to say you own it, it’s right up there with Conker’s Bad Fur Day for N64.
Games: Battle of the Bands
As promised last week, today we’re going to take a look at
Battle of the Bands
At first glance, this game looks like it can be a lot of fun. Well, it can once you get past the lack of content in the game itself. Lets have a look at some of what the game has to offer:
- A decent variety of songs (of course, no where near some of the more costlier games on the market)
- The joy of rhythm based games without the need to have any extras hanging around
- A quirky variation to the plain old ‘hit the notes and you win’ formula
Battle of the Bands offers some classic favorite songs such as Black Betty and Jungle Boogie; mixed in with some fun songs like Feel Good Inc. by the Gorillaz and Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones. Though the songs are few, they’re good to play.
Unlike some of the other rhythm games, Battle of the Bands uses only the wiimote to hit notes (left/right/down/stab/shake). It’s a fun concept, though a little tiring on the wrist at first on some of the higher difficulty levels. Also, if the wiimote is tilted it often doesn’t hit the note. Once you get used to this though, it’s a fantastic workout for your wrist.
Above all else what makes this game worth playing is the presentation itself. The game is one big battle, so you’re always in a versus mode against either an AI or a Player. Each band gets to choose a style of music, for example country and hip-hop. While playing, if the country team is in the lead the song which they’re playing will be done in a ‘country version’ (IE redneck accent and banjos). As the teams battle, the song jumps between the two bands’ type. It’s a riot when the types are conflicting as they switch seamlessly.
Another cooky part of this game is that you can attack the opposing player. Teams get the option of 3 weapons to use, all with different steak counts. Once a team has a streak to the length of the weapon, it will fire causing the other player to miss a beat if not blocked (hitting B). It’s quite off tilt to have a battle of the bands where you can shoot lightning at the drummer on the other team, but a blast none the less.
Overall, I can understand why this game is so cheap (I got it for $15) because though the concept of it is amazing, the final execution of it is lacking. If they had access to a larger library, or even if they had more modes or unlockable content it may have made it a little more interesting. For what the game is though, it was worth the cash and I’d suggest it to any music lover out there if not only for the music player feature that allows you to switch between styles without having to actually play the game.
Games: Rock Band 2
Today we’re going to get some rock off with our socks off with a quick review of Rock Band 2
For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘musical gaming’ genre, Rock Band and similar products often use controllers shaped like guitars or drums. You simply hit the colored buttons on the instruments in time with the colors on the screen to play the notes. A simple concept, but incredibly fun none the less.
What first made Harmonix’s Rock Band stand out in comparison to it’s nearest competitor Guitar Hero is that it allowed players to not only play guitar, but drum and sing as well. Though this has been evenly matched by the most recent Guitar Hero World Tour
Aside from just hitting the buttons to match colors, I think a huge part of the appeal of these games is that you can be part of a band, not just somebody playing a game at home on a Saturday night. Rock Band 2 takes advantage of this by giving players the ability to not only form a band with friends at close range, but to join with anybody online. This, for me, is a huge factor as the people online can’t see you dancing around in your PJs while playing We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos.
Rock Band 2 has also capitalized on the character creation factor of games, giving users the ability to make their avatar as normal or bizarre as they want it to be with everything from ripped jeans to a Viking helmet. Along those lines, users are able to register their bands online and put their custom bands into cool looking photos. They can even print out stickers and make t-shirts! (Check out yours truly rockin’ out here)
![Games: Rock Band 2](http://www.rockband.com/img/2976740/422" "Games: Rock Band 2"){kind=small}
But what good is playing when you don’t know any of the songs? Rock Band 2 has a ton of good songs, and (whenever Nintendo gets around to it) will feature downloadable content (DLC) to allow aspiring musicians to enhance their library even further.
The only fault I’d say (if anything) this game is lacking compared to Guitar hero is the ‘oddity’ factor. This is just playing songs, where as in Guitar hero there are ‘battles’ where you can throw off your enemy and random encores through out the game. It makes it good to spice up. Rock Band does this with ‘benefit shows’ and ‘TV recordings’, but the game play is still just playing the songs. It would be nice to see a mode to make it a little more interesting in Rock Band 3. (I have picked up another musical game today completely based around being strange, keep an eye out for a review)
So are any of you rock legends? Let me know in the comments below, maybe we can do some face melting some time. Rock on!
I am Batman Pac-Man
Let’s stick with some gaming fun here. To follow up with the totally badass furniture that I showed last week, I have found some more cool Pac-Man stuff that I would love to own.
Pac-Man Hoodie from Think Geek. If this doesn’t confuse people and earn you a hand full of cherries, an extra life and the all time high score, nothing will.
If that design made your headspin, you might be suffering from a Dot Overdose and need this shirt from Dead Zebra. Friends don’t let friends OD on Dots…But they do buy them the shirt.
And the last one for today (though not pac-man inspired) is the Most Deadly shirt from Busted Tees. You may recognize this from Perfect Dark (or maybe you don’t if you suck at it) but even the biggest lamer *cough DEL cough* can pretend to be old school now.
A Gamer’s home is his castle
*may or may not include princess*
I don’t know about you, but Pac-Man seems to constantly have an impact on my life. It may come in the form of a T-shirt from a friend or just me eating random dots off the ground. But after a long day of chasing ghosts, wouldn’t you like to just put your feet up? Me too, so buy me this footstool thanks.
While you’re at it, buy me this medal for being epicly old skool too. Console Wars Veteran
Referral Risk x2
Readers, I need your help to rule the world!
I’ve spent the past…god knows how long setting some SEO stuff up and retagging some things. Along the way I came across and older post from years ago called Troops, Fall In with a link to referral risk on it. This was cool, so it’s coming back.
What can you do? Click somewhere on the map below, it will conquer the part of the map on behalf of I R Blogging. Click a lot of you really love us. Those who help out leave a comment so I can send you your purple heart.
Avatar: Legends of Arena
09/20/08 Update: I’m seeing a lot of hits from people looking for the update on this after getting the “Can not connect to database,..recent version update blah blah”. Well I’ve been getting it too, doesn’t really seem to be telling the right error.
Solution: Reinstalled mine in the default directory (C:\Program Files). After starting the game (clicking on the shortcut to start the game), do not switch to another window. Do not click on any other programs or Alt-Tab to another program anytime after trying to start this game. Once it is started, it needs your full attention.
So Do not Go IM your friend while it’s loading. Do not continue to surf the internet. Do not change songs on your music player. Do not write up something in notepad. After clicking to load the game, just sit and wait for it to load, don’t do anything at all until it does. (this doesn’t mean close them all down, it just means don’t touch them anymore)
I find that if you switch to another program while this is running (at the start of the game, or anytime during) the next time it tries to load a screen it will display the ‘recent version’ error.
After the icon at the bottom of the screen spins for a minute (or 5) the yellow bar will blink green and the next screen will load. Again, just be sure you are always on the Avatar program’s window and it should be ok…most of the time.
This seems to work 9/10 times for me. So just keep trying, you’ll be able to connect eventually. It’s not you, it’s them.
Let me know if this works for you guys, thanks
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First off, I’m not sure why I like Avatar: The last Airbender. I guess it just hit me as “that could be cool” so I watched all of them. Don’t judge me.
Now to continue on, I just got watched the last 4 episodes of Book 3 yesterday and thought when he went into avatar form again he was totally badass. The whole dragon-turtle thing was kind of weird though. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I just saw a post talking about an MMO for Avatar titled Avatar: Legends of the Arena coming out in September and my mind just went into ‘yay’ mode.
Unfortunately, however, I then start thinking about the previous Avatar games they released and my hopes are dashed. I’ll be trying this out since it sounds to be mostly PVP which can prove for a bit of fun, but if they start charging for it my chips are off the table. Guess we’ll see in two months when it’s released.
I found a video of it (below) which could be interesting. Skip to about 2m30s to see some actual action.
WoW – What is wrong with this world
This subject is a statement, not a question. World of Warcraft is what is wrong with this world. It’s obvious to me now. How did I figure this out? By looking on craigslist and seeing WoW accounts selling for $400, $500, and as high as $1100 dollars. WHAT THE HELL?
For my first point, I just want to let all of you brain dead morons that buy these accounts know: THE ENTIRE POINT OF A GAME IS TO PLAY IT. Novel idea, I know, but stick with me here. If you started mario after he’d killed Koopa, it’d be pretty boring. Same principle applies.
For my second point, if you have that kind of coin, why the HELL are you buying an account that you could get for free? Are you mentally touched? Are you THAT busy that you can’t work your way through a game? Are you Paris Hilton? Please, someone that’s bought one of these accounts, comment and tell me why I’m a closed-minded idiot for not getting this.
So in conclusion, with the economic crisis going on in many parts of the world, with genocide in Darfur and children starving to death, is it REALLY economically reliable to put your entire life savings in an MMO account?
Here’s a little free advice for you freaks, straight from me to you. STOP WASTING YOUR GOD DAMN MONEY ON GAMING ACCOUNTS AND THROW IT AWAY SOME WHERE ELSE. Here are a few suggestions: