Borderland - First impressions....

Just bought Borderland for the PC. I bought it through Steam, all from the comfort of my own home. Brilliant!

I got it because I'm looking for a game that I can play with my 3 mates. There are so few games that you can play with 4 people so we've been mainly playing World of Warcraft, which does us proud. But sometimes it woul be nice to have a faster paced game we can all play. Enter Boarderland.

There are a number of massive similarities to Fall Out 3, in fact you're even looking for a mystical Vault.....sounds a bit familiar.

However it kicks off with a really good intro and tutorial level. Its an arcadey quest based FPS with good quality cartoony graphics. So I put in 3 or 4 hours and I'm delighted to report its really quite good. Huge variety of guns and equipment, it ticks all the boxes of a basic RPG with classes, skill points and experience.

I've managed to get up to level 11 and some of the missions listed as tough or hard are starting to live up to their rating. I think it may have legs.

It really reminds me of a few other games the vehicle I've tried so far is straight out of Halo, the look and feel reminds me a little bit of 13 (if you can remember that far back). The mobs are from Fall out 3 a couple of them are really funny (pygmy psycho). Its clearly been written for a console with some slightly annoying UI controls but this is a truly minor gripe. A little bit repetitive here and there but it is fun and addictive.

So now I need to persuade my 3 mates to buy it so we can check out the supposedly impressive co-op play....

Steam actually helpfully offer 4 copies for sale in a bumper pack, although it is actually a couple of pence dearer to buy the bumper pack than 4 separate copies which is a bit silly.

My WoW account was hacked !!!

I logged of last night just after ten, a fairly average run on Azjol Nerub having just occupied the last two hours and logged out from my beloved WoW account (playing since beta - over 150 days of play time on existing characters - 9 in total).
I logged in this morning to have a quick look at my auctions before work and straight away one of my characters isn't showing.... I know it's only a game, but a feeling of cold dread started to creep up on me - quickly logging in to one of my characters I straight away knew there was a problem, I was in a different location and some items of gear were clearly missing (epics of course), a quick check of my bags revealed pretty much empty and the 1600 gold on this character was gone!
Now that was annoying (understatement), but then I got logged out and I just knew the hacker was still in my account and I'd probably kicked them by logging on, so I logged back in again only be kicked again 20 seconds later! Then started a 10 minute battle of logging in and getting disconnected, my character in a slightly different location each time I logged back in while I quickly changed my e-mail on BattleNet - finally logging in with a new password and hopefully banishing the scum sucking hacker for good.
The damage was horrendous, but could have been worse - one of my main crafting characters was deleted (bizarrely this one had high level guild bank access but they hadn't taken anything) and four of my highest level characters (2x 80's and 2x 70+) had been been completely cleaned out, about 4000G and whole host of epics and banks full of mats (I'd been saving up for transmutes and skilling up).
A quick GM ticket later and Blizzard are working to fix my issues, whether I'll get the deleted character back, and all my items and gold we'll have to see - so fingers crossed and temper currently held until I know what's happening.
My account was hacked by a new key-logger, my AV now finds it but in the few days while it was new it sailed past my AV (from a free games sites accessed by my the kids I believe), obviously a fairly professional set-up and quite a lot of effort to get my gold.
But it did get me to thinking, if you do buy wow gold from web-site, where has it come from ? I'm guessing there's a fair number of these sites that get their money from hacks and other illegal behaviour - so you might be getting some easy gold, but some other player has suffered hard for it, maybe think about that the next time you see cheap gold advertised. ( I do wholly support abusing gold sellers btw)

Just a final note, this blog is actually written by a couple of different people who share a few things, we're early-middle-aged(ish) and keen gamers with probably 50+ years of gaming between us - we're not paid by anyone to write this, we do it because we love gaming and the activities that surround it and we're interested in the whole web 2.0 experience.
So don't think that this is some Blizzard sponsored rant about evil gold sellers, it's someone who has friends who have bought gold and also used power levelling services, I don't judge them, that's their choice but it's not for me. But it's quite clear that other gamers are being ripped off for the few who want to take short-cuts, now whether or not this is fuelled by the long term grind created by the game itself and it's focus on success driven by items and gold rather than individual skill is perhaps a blog for another day.
I'll post an update on how the recovery process goes later, for now, I'm out of here
The Dog

Computer Game A.I.

I heard recently that gamers are typically quiet loyal about which MMO games they play. We only spend time on one. I think its the same with other genres too. At the moment if I fancy a bit of shooting its COD4 (I think I'm getting excited about Modern Warfare 2). If I want to do some subjugating and conquering I'm playing Empire Total War...again.

Its such a deep game - the mix between real time and turn based is still the best I've seen. I've completed it a few time but its got me thinking about AI in today's strategy games.

I'm not a developer and I'm no techie but the AI seems to be a little bit substandard. For instance, If I'm defending a fort, and the sieging army has managed to blow a hole in the wall - you'd imagine it would be bad news. But no due to AI problems it means you can hardly lose. Simply line up 3 rows of soldiers (and a puckle gun if you've got it) and the opposing army will stream through the hole in the wall - the first wave of attack will be obliterated very quickly. So surely a bit of basic AI would say, hmmm don't do that again. But alas no, they keep on coming and they keep on dying. The poor AI has caused a loop hole which basically means I can complete the game very very easily - even on the hardest setting.

So my point - is it really so difficult to have slightly more thoughtful AI in a strategy game. Is a strong single player game experience no longer so important? It wasn't so long ago that FARCRY came out. Its enemy soldier AI was remarkable they'd flush you out with pincer movements and do what you least wanted them to - brilliant!

I hoped that the more thoughtful, intelligent AI would find its way into strategy games too. But no - there seems to be the rush approach, the turtle approach and that is about it. I want clever thoughtful strategy which isn't obvious. Clearly the multi player settings mean that you can have a more realistic challenge against another person, but again it often comes down to who knows the latest rush trick. Very rarely will you have a well balanced game. I want single player clever AI strategy games. Is it too much to ask?