Vanguard in Review
Monday, February 5th, 2007
So I played Vanguard some more this weekend (up to 37 hours total now as you can see from my XFire link) to the detriment of several tasks I needed to work on, and I have to say that, while many of my original comments still ring true, I am finding myself liking the game more and more. I think the key is to get past the first 10 levels (the “newbie” experience). Once you go beyond that, things change drastically gameplay wise. Suddenly, everyone is grouping, the non-instanced dungeon runs start happening, and the world begins to feel much larger. I’m up to level 13 now with my Goblin rogue (I’m on the RP server - name’s Needles - look me up if you play), and I’ve started having my fair share of deaths. Death is no trivial matter as it tends to be in games like WoW - you lose some XP and may find that your corpse is just too far into a dungeon to try to get it back. If this is the case, you’ll end up using one of the altars to summon your corpse and collect any gear on it.
The term ‘easy to learn – hard to master’ comes to mind when I think about Mercury Meltdown Remix for the Play Station 2. Another good description for this simple, but challenging game would be simulation gameplay done right. Mercury Meltdown Remix (MMR for short) is just the kind of fun and addictive game that captures the casual marketplace – something you can pick up and play for a few minutes at a time, having great fun in the process.
What makes a game next-gen? Some might think that simply being released on the newest console platforms makes a game next-gen. Others might argue that next-gen is all about graphics. While both arguments are correct, they are only partially so, and though there have been many releases for the current cycle of consoles (many more so for the Xbox 360 thus far), an elite few of those releases can truly be referred to as next-gen in my opinion. Gears of War, developed on top of the astonishing Unreal Engine 3 technology platform, may very well be one of the only defacto next-gen games to come out so far. At the least, it scores in the top echelon of the next-gen lineup, pushing the 360’s GPU to the edge of its capabilities and providing a high definition cinematic experience with a mirror shine polish to the core game mechanics.
Back in ‘the day’, as they say, there was a little game on the Commodore 64 called Elite. It was a vector graphics funhouse of space combat and drug running from star system to star system. Docking was manually done to the tune of the Blue Danube, and hours of my young life were wasted as I blasted and traded my way up the ranks of better ships and galactic infamy. Enter Eve Online, stage left. I’ve had my eyes on this game since it first came out. Could it be the Elite replacement I always yearned for? Could it recapture my love for space games the way Privateer did? For a long time, I avoided downloading the game. Now, here we are end of year 2006, and I finally gave in, installed the game, and forced myself to go through the incredibly long tutorial (I’ll get back to that shortly).