Big Fat Ostrich

Someone I know (Dan) has not shut up for the past 3 weeks about this “Demon’s Souls”. Yeah yeah, I thought. Just like WoW, and “Hero Guys”, or whatever it was called. I figured it’s just another MMORPG, but it’s not.

In fact, me and co-blogger Dan had a real live gaming session over at his pad this week, and you know what? It’s not a MMOPRG at all! It’s actually a pretty sweet ass game.

Now I may be like 70 years old, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gone through life wearing big oversized sunglasses. I’ve SEEN the evolution of computer games, and I’ll be first to admit that I was wrong about Pacman being the end all of videogames.

But Demon’s Souls is special. Even an old dude like me can see that. It’s like they took the best elements from the last 20 years of “single dude killing bad guys games” and rolled it all into Demon’s Souls. And made it look amazing to boot.

Figuring out how to move the guy around the map was pretty easy, even for me. In fact, once I got used to the gorgeous landscapes and smooth move-ability, I could concentrate on killing bad guys and stuff. Oh yeah, it’s a medieval setting if you didn’t know, and you start off navigating through a huge ass freaky castle. Classic dark ages stuff. You can almost smell the plague and become friends with it.

Demon’s Souls is also REALLY hard, and if you die, you go back to the beginning of the map. But it’s totally worth it. It’s rare for me to say this but it’s a fun game to be in. Like a cozy slime-filled sock or something. If I had the console that this game is played on (PS3 I think?) I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t shut up about it either.

Oh yeah, I got to see level 2 where there are these disgusting cthuluesque motherfuckers that electrocute you and then suck your soul out through a horrendous kiss of death. The makers of Demon’s Souls managed to make it just realistic enough that I really felt tense as I VERY cautiously explored the stinking dungeon.

So yeah, it’s a really well made game. I might suck at it, but this non-gamer is impressed.

m.

When I got my PSP, the dude who sold it to me was all proud to tell me that I’d be “getting FIFA 2008 with it for free!” I tried my best to look happy about it. Then I ran to the store to buy something else. A game that kept popping here and there in PSP discussions was Capcom’s Monster Hunter. Best selling in Japan? Got monsters AND hunting in it? Got big guns and even bigger swords? Costs 40 bucks? HOW COULD I RESIST!??!?!? So I went and bought the “Freedom Unite” version,  because a bunch of nonsensical words at the end of a game title always makes me giggle.

I won’t lie to you, at first I was a bit disoriented. The interface is a little dry, the font they use feels amateurish, and I’m not sure at all about the haircuts. But I persevered. I equipped my dude, picked a quest and went on my merry way. And that’s when I got raped by a posse of mammoth-like creatures. Then I learned about time limits, armor crafting and enhancing, fishing, bug catching, mushroom gathering, etc. The game is complex, the learning curve is somewhat steep, but man it’s rewarding. AND addicting! I’m now working toward killing my first “real” monster. I almost got him the last time, but I think I’m gonna have to use traps and lures and a sniper bowgun. A big sword just doesn’t cut it. Ha ha. Cut it. Oh and they say the game really comes alive when you play online with friends. I haven’t tried that mode yet but I will soon. I have a feeling this could easily become like a real MMO experience all in the palm of my hand! And I can totally dig the idea…

So if you’re looking for a deep, rich RPG experience full of danger and action, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP might just be it.

Peace.

Dan

I truly, honestly, really was not going to write about Mafia Wars anymore. I swear. In fact, I was starting to distance myself from the game since I’d seen just about all there was to see once I got to level 90. But they’re crafty over there at Zynga, oh yes they are, and they just keep reeling you in. So welcome to a little post about the latest Mafia Wars expansion: Cuba

After doing most of the jobs in the original New York tier, many of us started to wonder what would be next. After all, you can’t just do the same old jobs over and over again. There isn’t a lot of fun in just getting experience. The fun is in how you get there. So, like most role playing games, an expansion was in order. Mafia Wars has had occasional add ons, like Robbing, and special loot. With Cuba, this is the biggest expansion I’ve seen in my time playing the game. It’s like, Mafia Wars x 2.

Without going into a huge amount of detail (yeah, I know 4 blogs on the subject already), let’s just say that Cuba offers a whole new range of jobs to do, new Cuba-centric weapons and loot, as well as new collections like tropical drinks, fruit, and beards! Yes, I said beards. There really is a Beards collection which is perfectly logical since cool beards go hand in hand with revolutionaries and badasses. I mean, just saying the word ‘Cuba’ conjures up images of Fidel pensively stroking his pubic beard while sucking on a Perfecto.

Mafia Wars Cuba also offers Businesses to ‘take over’, which you’ll need in order to generate some income. The income in Cuba is in Cuban Pesos too, which are kept in a separate bank from your Yankee dollars.

These businesses function differently from the New York properties in that they produce a product, whether it’s Sugar Cane, or Tobacco. Once you take over a business, you can invest in it so that it produces more output, which you can then cash out into cold hard worthless pesos. Like New York, you’ll need the cash to buy items for jobs. The jobs in Cuba require items not found in New York, so save your pesos for that CM Venga.

With this expansion, I think that interest in the game is somewhat renewed. I can only guess at future expansions like Mafia Wars Monaco, Las Vegas, Sicily, or Japan. Hmm…Yakuza Wars anyone? Zynga should totally hire me as an idea man.

P.S. Since this was first posted, Mafia Wars expansions have included Moscow and Bangkok (get your passport now!) with Las Vegas coming in 2010. New collections to vault have been added as well, including the ever elusive Money Laundering collection. Money Laundering is available in the New York tier and is dropped rarely. You’ll need to ask you Facebook friends for help looting it. Good luck.

Update – Achievements in Bangkok: When you fight against either the Yakuza or Triad factions, your status will increase with one, but decrease against the other. Now there are 3 new achievements related to this: Dead or Alive, Hard Boiled, and Bangkok Dangerous. You only need to concentrate on Bangkok Dangerous which is to gain Allied Status in both factions at the same time. Here’s a tip on how to get it:

When fighting, see saw your attacks between Yakuza and Triad. Since each attack is based on the simple formula of +2 points for the attacker and -1 point for the defender, simply alternate your faction attacks and your status will increase in parallel with both factions. Eventually, you’ll hit Allied Status for both Yakuza and Triad, at the same time. This way, you can get all three achievements around the same time.

My previous Mafia Wars gaming post was getting way too long, so here are some nicely contained tips for y’all:

*Super Hot Mafia Wars Game Playing Tips*

Like any role playing game, your character gets stronger each time you level up. What should you do with those hard earned skill points?

Defense: I cannot stress this enough. Whether you’re buying armor, weapons or vehicles, think about defense before attack. As well, whenever you level up, use your skill points to increase your defense before anything else. As a rule of thumb, I increase 2 defense for every 1 attack. The rest gets spread over Energy, Stamina and Health.

Attack: Attack is very important as well, but since you should be putting most of your skill points into defense, back up your attack by having good weapons. So buy Chain Guns and Town Cars. You’ll notice that they get used in your fights often because they are among your strongest items, aside from items collected into your loot.

Godfather Points: Godfather points are used to buy extra skill points, mafia members, mystery loot as well as topping up your stamina, health and energy. Since they are hard to come buy, I’d recommend using them to buy skill points and pad your defense and attack. Don’t waste your godfather points on changing your name. If you’re just starting out, choose a name you’ll be happy with. For originality (and privacy), stay away from using your real name as your character name.

Loot: Loot is acquired through Jobs and Fights. The more jobs and fights you do, the more loot you have the chance of getting, which will increase your ability to win more fights in the future and level up faster. So fight often!

Limited Edition Loot: These items are offered by the game on a weekly basis. Usually the item has some significance related to a current event or holiday. For example, a recent one was an Indy Racer as a nod to the 93rd annual Indy 500. It’s a good idea to buy a lot of these whenever they come out since they offer a good attack/defense ratio, but there’s a catch: You can only buy 1 for every 2 friends you have. So you’ll have to go get some more friends if you want to beef up on these special items. Which brings us to…

Getting a bigger mafia: Ok, I said it before. Facebook sucks, but dammit, I have a mafia to run, so let’s add some “friends” who are even lower on the totem pole than John McClendon from my grade 3 second period finger painting class who made me eat glue that one time. There are two ways to do this:

• Spam your real friends: This is the worst way in my opinion. If your real friends haven’t joined your mafia by now, give it a rest. They ain’t joining. And if they do, there’s a good chance that they won’t play the game actively anyway. Leave them be.

• Add friends from the Mafia Wars Forums: If you want to increase your mafia size, this is the way to do it. Go to the Mafia Wars Add Me thread in the Forums, and simply add some friends by clicking on people’s ‘Add as Friend‘ link. As good etiquette, include a note stating “mafia wars” or something so they know how you found them. After they have joined your mafia, you can delete them as Facebook friends if you want. Just know that they will not be able to help you out on a job if they aren’t friends with you.

Fighting other players: If you’re being attacked over and over, don’t sweat it. First, build on your defense. As you get stronger, people will start leaving you alone. If, on the other hand, you attack indiscriminately (attacking the same people over and over again, day after day), you’ll get a bad rep and you’ll end up on the Hitlist. A lot. But even that isn’t such a big deal.

Super tip: When you fight other players, you become more visible. If you attack often, prepare to have to defend yourself.

Properties and getting robbed: We all get greedy sometimes, and buying a lot of Mega Casinos is a good way to generate cash. But be careful: overextending yourself will leave you with damaged property, with little to defend with. Only build what you can afford, and build a lot if you have the defense to back it up. You need to have a strong mafia, good armor and weapons, and nicely padded profile points. If you’re still getting robbed, don’t repair and collect the 30% that you’ll get anyway until you’re at a higher level.

In the end, there’s not a lot you can do to stop attacks since that’s a major part of the game anyway. But, you can choose your fights and know when to walk away from one. What would you do in the real world?

There are also a couple of other nice ways to beef up you character:

• Collections: When doing jobs in each level (or tier), you can randomly get items to complete various collections such as Billiard Balls, Poker Chips, Cigars, etc. Once you’ve completed a collection, you can Vault it. Doing so will give you a bonus for your character. There’s not much to think about here as getting the items are based on luck of the draw. You can always swap items with fellow mafia members.

• Gifting: You can gift items from your loot or your collections to any of your mafia family. My aim here is to try to give my team something that they need. I know, I know, we like holding onto those strong items. but to be fair, I feel bad sending people junk, like the Brass Knuckles. If you’re like me, you have too many to count. I do try to see what a mafia member might be missing, and if I can, I try to give them something useful. If you’re lucky, and they’re nice, they’ll help you out too. They may even help you complete a collection! It happened to me, it really did

• Achievements: Achievements are relatively new to the game and earning them will award you with a pretty small bonus (like 1 skill point for the most part). They range from the easy to the more challenging. Easy being the Giver achievement, which is awarded by giving 10 gifts to your mafia. Some of the more challenging ones include completing 9 collections, or helping out 200 mafia members on jobs. It’s tough, but one day… one day…

Now sit back, grow your mafia and get stronger. Trust me. You’ll get there with patience. I’m not aware of any cheats or bots for easy leveling, but I would strongly advise against installing any extra software on your machine since that’s a quick way to get viruses. Play fair and you’ll have more fun.

m.

If you’re looking for Mafia Wars strategy tips, check out my other post here.

I hate Facebook and I swore I’d never join. But once I did join about 18 months ago, the reasons why I didn’t want to join in the first place were confirmed: status updates (which basically all say “pay attention to me!”) and being hounded by people I wasn’t friends with the first time around. I know, I know. I’m not the first one to bitch about it.

So why the hell am I still on Facebook?

Obviously, if you found this post, then you know why. Mafia Wars.

Mafia Wars is another highly addictive online RPG by Zynga, creators of tons of Facebook games like Street Racing, Scramble and too many to mention here. And, thanks to Facebook (sigh) there’s a huge player base with over 10 million people playing. The principle is simple: create a mafia dude and make him better by fighting other mafia dudes, mafias, and doing various jobs to earn cash so you can buy weapons and property.  Like any RPG, each subsequent level gets tougher and you need more experience to advance which means you need more weapons, more property, more money, more everything. It’s an endless cycle really, and in the end, highly predictable in the sense that once you’ve done 1 level, you’ve done them all.

THEN WHY AM I STILL PLAYING??

Because Mafia Wars is really well put together. There’s no real storyline, just you doing the same jobs that everyone else is doing. As you get better, you reach higher tiers and get rewarded with special weapons and loot. You begin as a lowly Street Thug and make your way up the ranks, towards the Boss levels. The game is ever evolving, so you just have to keep playing to see where it goes.

There’s just something pleasing about the game that keeps me coming back for more. It might be the stats. I like stats. Stats make me giddy. You can watch your stats grow as you rise up the ranks in your own mafia. There’s also a global leaderboard, so you can get an idea just how long you’ll be playing this thing (level 1057 anyone?), if the addiction holds. So far I’m a Level 56 Hitman and I still can’t get enough.

A few things that I really appreciate about Mafia Wars:

1. Players are not searchable. This removes a certain level of harassment from the game, so most people can play for fun.

2. Mostly fair fighting and robbing: You can only fight other players who are reasonably close to your level of experience (under normal circumstances). That way a Level 217 can’t attack a Level 3. Unless you’re on the Hitlist.

3. Limited animation. With text and static images, the game play is faster (fine, the revolver lags at times). The images of weaponry and loot are slick and pleasing to the eye. Personally, I think overt animation would detract from the game itself, so kudos to Zynga for keeping it simple.

4. No chat feature. Need i say more?  After all, you’re whacking other players, who will no doubt get pissed when you fight them and win. Better to let the gun do the talking.

With these great features, and others, there are less ways for people to cheat, so most players can just play and enjoy. Plus, you can now play Mafia wars on the iPhone as well. The iPhone version of Mafia wars will import your mafia from the Facebook version, but your gangster will have to start from the beginning since your Facebook mafia stats are not imported.

That’s it. Time to fight some more, punk!

P.S. I still hate you, Facebook!

Hello there! Boy it’s been a long time. I was in the woods all along, growing my beard and hunting wild animals with my bare hands to survive. The best thing about the woods is, you have a whole lot of free time. I chose to spend most of that free time playing Dragon Quest V on my DS and I have something akin to a review brewing. For now I’ll only say that it’s my favorite RPG to date. I’m not the biggest RPG fan to start with, but I played and enjoyed a bunch of them (most recent one being The Last Remnant, which I hope I can review soon as well). I won’t even get into the MMORPGs because I become angry every time I do. All that to say, I have something to compare Dragon Quest V to. I promise a lengthy post about it before the end of the month.

On another topic, I think it’s important to mention the AWESOME AWESOME WORK of a bunch of ex 1UPpers who now go by the name of Area5. Those are the guys behind the now defunct 1UP Show, and they now create a weekly video feature called CO-OP, among other things. If it’s possible to love someone you’ve never met or talked to, well that’s what I feel for those guys. Love. A whole fucking lot of it. Check em out, download their show, digg them, send em long creepy emails or booze, you know, all those things superstars deserve. I really think what they’re doing now, the way they’re talking about video games and the people who make them, is of vital importance for the industry. It is historic stuff. This post will probably add like, one dude to their fan base (one dude who stumbled upon our site looking for “Food Porn” or some sick shit), but still, it’s one dude I send their way with all my heart.

And to finish, I wanna announce a feature that’s coming soon to the blog. “What to do when fucking Solaris 10 doesn’t fucking do what it’s supposed to and you can’t find the documentation any fucking where”. I may shorten the title a bit. But yeah, I plan on posting a bunch of tech articles for n00b Solaris 10 admins (especially those coming from the linux world and expecting as much good and free web documentation for Solaris 10 and SURPRISE! It’s not the case at all!), based on experiences and problems I’ve had myself at work. Hopefully it’ll save some people some precious time.

That’s it for now.

Later everyone,

Dan

Man.

Are you ready?

ARE YOU?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that Conficker is about to be unleashed on the world this Wednesday, April 1st. Up until now we’ve been fed mere scraps by the media, but that’s to be expected. With most software releases, the media is the last place you’d look for useful information. Especially when it comes to the software/gaming industry.

Something like this comes around once (usually 10 times) in a person’s lifetime. I don’t mean lifetimes as we measure them in human years, but more in internet years, which is about every 15 minutes or so.

Conficker is the biggest thing to come along since WoW (World of Warcraft for the layman), and because it’s free, it will blow away all of those multi-player games that require monthly subscriptions. From what I gather in the initial press reports, most Windows desktop computers already come bundled with it (Linux users, you are flat out of luck this time!)

The idea behind Conficker is very Utopian in nature, if not a little idealistic. A few years back, we started to see the proliferation of distributed computing used for “protein folding” which is noble enough in that over time the simulations can lead to cures and treatments for diseases. There was also SETI@home which is ongoing and a cool idea, but you don’t really accomplish much in the long run. Really now people. Aliens? Personally I’d rather be involved in something a little more “real world”.

That’s where Conficker comes in. We still don’t have a lot of information on player classes and missions, but from what everyone seems to agree on is that Conficker is a group effort with a common goal, which is nice for a change! Almost every single MMORPG that comes out these days is about killing monsters, or blindly attacking “those guys” over there on the hill:

“Why do we hate those guys?”
“I dunno. We just do.”
“Let’s get ‘em!”
“Yeah!”

Personally, I think it’s time we’ve evolved past all the fantasy and swordplay. Conficker offers a real communal scenario where millions (that is ALOT) of computers will all be working together, gathering information, and organizing data. And it’s free, which is great! But there’s still so much mystery around it and it’s still not clear where we can get it from. We don’t even have any screenshots of it, and usually screenshots are your highway-side billboard. But since Conficker is free, who cares? Not I, that’s for sure.

Wow.

Is it tomorrow yet?