Why not. Next fans session should be January 28 2011, in the evening. 21:00 Eastern Standart Time.
We will start with Team Fortress 2 for maybe two hours, then if we have less than 9 players remaining we'll switch to L4D2 and play until EXHAUSTION!. I'm sure there will be more than 8 players this time, so starting with TF2 is the better way around.
On date, when the time will be near, I will send a triple warning on Youtube, the steam group then Facebook. You will be able to join through the Steam Group.
If we ever have more than 28 players, then sry for you. You can use the auto-join, otherwise better luck next time.
See you next week!
Difficult is never enough!
- Anzariel
- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- If dying over and over is something you enjoy (fondly) then this blog may be for you. I offer honest game reviews, news feed from my two explosive Youtube channels and a slice of my french thoughts (When my phoenix permits me, he's edgy sometimes...). Have a good read and enjoy your stay!
January 20, 2011
January 17, 2011
Reviewing: Bioshock 2
Well, there it is. My first video game review ever, hope I can do everything right.
At first, I got a bad start, receiving multiple negative remarks from some of my friends, especially Kinjry. If you cannot imagine, then he said the words "it's" and "lame" in the same sentence. Then, some weeks later, Notch posted a list of games he personally played and rated them. His verdict? "More of the same".
My, I finally have enough money to get it (during the Steam christmas sales, thank god for that) and I already fear or my enjoyment. Once back from vacation I jumped into the game. While I completely understand the "more of the same" statement, I must say it's a little bit more of that
Of course, it is a first person shooter, under the sea, in a sub-oceanic ruined city with the same atmosphere. You HAVE to expect that, especially if you look at trailers before buying games. However, they made the recipe a lot better. Most of the annoyances in the first opus are gone, either replaced by something easier, faster, a lot more reactive or simply removed. While the story is unveiled at the same pace (most of it is discovered with the help of voice recorders scattered everywhere, just like the first one), This time the direction it took is the complete opposite. In the first game, you desperately fight to find a way to escape this crazied hole. In Bioshock 2, you desperately fight to go deeper and deeper, struggling through the city to save your protégé. While this little detail may look small, it is a big difference. Your nemesis is, again, forever willing to sacrifice every single life in order to stop you, and there's still plot twists to make you say oh s***! If you loved the first one, there's no reason to hate the sequel. Plus, this time, you have this giant drill, it'll teach them good.
There is two main points that bothered me in the first game: Hacking and combat versatility. I hated hacking because it constantly stopped the flow of the game. It always took a long time, you could do it while in combat, and most often I simply didn't bother with it. Well, they fixed that. Now, it takes a couple of seconds at most, it's ultra simplified (meters goes left and right, stop it on green or blue, done), and it doesn't stop the flow of the action. Sure, doing it while enemies are pummeling you with lead may be a bad idea, but at least it's more realist. Or you can use a hack-dart (or even better, a auto-dart) to safely hack and corrupt something from a distance. I especially love doing this to those who have flying bots with them. Talk about a slap to the face!
Something else I hated about the first one was the combat moves, or plasmids in this case. I'll say it, I'm a sucker for spells and techniques you can learn. So when I upgraded my immolate plasmid to rank 2 or 3, I was expecting a little more than a few added sparks and damage. Well, FIX'D! Now, everytime you upgrade a plasmid, it comes with a new way of using it. It goes from charging your fireball to call a bot from anywhere and giving it a name, if you had the good tonic, which is the passive kind of abilities. The Insect Swarm plasmid is especially devastating against fleshy targets. Rank 3 will transform your victims into nests full of blood-thirsty wasps. Lasts longer with more victims! You know I love flames and fiery stuff, so try to guess what Immolate rank 3 looks like!
There is also a multiplayer mode! It's basic, sure, but it's there, with plasmids and guns and some killing sprees to boot! Death match, capture points, capture the flag, team matches, the basic! Imagine COD mixed in the world of bioshock, and you have it. So I won't talk about it that much.
Other than that, the audio in Bioshock 2 is as good as the first one, if not better. Sound effects still makes you paranoid, the music is creepy (or jazzy sometimes) and the voice acting is really well done. Artworks is, in my opinion, even better than the first one, letting you explore the city from the outside and showing quite a lot of details. It maybe lacks from a set of new enemies, but the few additions each have their cold signature. Especially the Big Sisters, who will make a hell of your life. For these hardcore players who plays without vita-chambers (capsule where you respawn if killed), it is a tremendous battle, and her screech announcing her visit will freeze your blood.
Overall, it is a good game that will take at least around 8 hours of your time. It is indeed more of the same, but they polished it a bit, oiled some joints, and gave it a big'ol rivet gun. So go get that creativity of yours and show them the art of traps! I don't like the idea of "game scores", they're weightless and useless. Call of Dooooty: Black ops may have a 9.0 on Gamespot, I still prefer X-com: UFO Defense. I prefer talking about how I feel about the game, not giving it a medal. However their reviews by themselves are good, don't get me wrong.
At first, I got a bad start, receiving multiple negative remarks from some of my friends, especially Kinjry. If you cannot imagine, then he said the words "it's" and "lame" in the same sentence. Then, some weeks later, Notch posted a list of games he personally played and rated them. His verdict? "More of the same".
My, I finally have enough money to get it (during the Steam christmas sales, thank god for that) and I already fear or my enjoyment. Once back from vacation I jumped into the game. While I completely understand the "more of the same" statement, I must say it's a little bit more of that
Of course, it is a first person shooter, under the sea, in a sub-oceanic ruined city with the same atmosphere. You HAVE to expect that, especially if you look at trailers before buying games. However, they made the recipe a lot better. Most of the annoyances in the first opus are gone, either replaced by something easier, faster, a lot more reactive or simply removed. While the story is unveiled at the same pace (most of it is discovered with the help of voice recorders scattered everywhere, just like the first one), This time the direction it took is the complete opposite. In the first game, you desperately fight to find a way to escape this crazied hole. In Bioshock 2, you desperately fight to go deeper and deeper, struggling through the city to save your protégé. While this little detail may look small, it is a big difference. Your nemesis is, again, forever willing to sacrifice every single life in order to stop you, and there's still plot twists to make you say oh s***! If you loved the first one, there's no reason to hate the sequel. Plus, this time, you have this giant drill, it'll teach them good.
There is two main points that bothered me in the first game: Hacking and combat versatility. I hated hacking because it constantly stopped the flow of the game. It always took a long time, you could do it while in combat, and most often I simply didn't bother with it. Well, they fixed that. Now, it takes a couple of seconds at most, it's ultra simplified (meters goes left and right, stop it on green or blue, done), and it doesn't stop the flow of the action. Sure, doing it while enemies are pummeling you with lead may be a bad idea, but at least it's more realist. Or you can use a hack-dart (or even better, a auto-dart) to safely hack and corrupt something from a distance. I especially love doing this to those who have flying bots with them. Talk about a slap to the face!
Something else I hated about the first one was the combat moves, or plasmids in this case. I'll say it, I'm a sucker for spells and techniques you can learn. So when I upgraded my immolate plasmid to rank 2 or 3, I was expecting a little more than a few added sparks and damage. Well, FIX'D! Now, everytime you upgrade a plasmid, it comes with a new way of using it. It goes from charging your fireball to call a bot from anywhere and giving it a name, if you had the good tonic, which is the passive kind of abilities. The Insect Swarm plasmid is especially devastating against fleshy targets. Rank 3 will transform your victims into nests full of blood-thirsty wasps. Lasts longer with more victims! You know I love flames and fiery stuff, so try to guess what Immolate rank 3 looks like!
There is also a multiplayer mode! It's basic, sure, but it's there, with plasmids and guns and some killing sprees to boot! Death match, capture points, capture the flag, team matches, the basic! Imagine COD mixed in the world of bioshock, and you have it. So I won't talk about it that much.
Other than that, the audio in Bioshock 2 is as good as the first one, if not better. Sound effects still makes you paranoid, the music is creepy (or jazzy sometimes) and the voice acting is really well done. Artworks is, in my opinion, even better than the first one, letting you explore the city from the outside and showing quite a lot of details. It maybe lacks from a set of new enemies, but the few additions each have their cold signature. Especially the Big Sisters, who will make a hell of your life. For these hardcore players who plays without vita-chambers (capsule where you respawn if killed), it is a tremendous battle, and her screech announcing her visit will freeze your blood.
Overall, it is a good game that will take at least around 8 hours of your time. It is indeed more of the same, but they polished it a bit, oiled some joints, and gave it a big'ol rivet gun. So go get that creativity of yours and show them the art of traps! I don't like the idea of "game scores", they're weightless and useless. Call of Dooooty: Black ops may have a 9.0 on Gamespot, I still prefer X-com: UFO Defense. I prefer talking about how I feel about the game, not giving it a medal. However their reviews by themselves are good, don't get me wrong.
January 14, 2011
Back to work, back to school, and two more stories.
Well, my vacation times are now over, and it was awesome, but it's back to this life of working routine. Thank god I have the internetz.
Well, the hardest part was the switch between day and night. I work night shifts, for those who doesn't know (I'm a night watchmen in a residence for people who suffers from mental illness. Nothing dangerous, in fact they are semi-autonomous and most can take care of themselves). I did the switch in a 2 days period too, so it was kind of swift. I also had a lot of work to do yesterday, going from garbage cans without bags in them (and more than full, why the hell not) to floors so dirty they were brown. I understand, it's winter, there's a lot of slush everywhere. Still, it's clear that nobody cleaned the floor at all for nearly two weeks. I also found some...errr... remnants of a substance on some door knobs. Happy stuff like that, just like any first day-back-from-a-long-break.
Also, yesterday, I officially got back into school. Well, I paid for it. I'm starting January 31 with only one class which is called LITTERATURE ET IMAGINAIRE and I definitely hate it. I failed it two times in a row and learned that music and anything else at the same time is not a good idea in college. So now, after more than three years of not going to school, I think it's time I repair the broken chips of my past. It'll surely feel all better after I fix these failures of my life...oh, and I'm not going back in music. I don't want to practice 5 hours each day for the rest of my life, so I'm going into writing :D
Aside from that, two little stories. Guess what my sister bought me for Christmas. She "hired" my best friend and they "helpfully forced me" into painting parts of my apartment. Me and my ex-girlfriend never found the time for this kind of project. The people who lived there had horrible tastes but I never bothered into doing this myself. Guess it was THAT pathetic if she had to "force" me.
Anyway, we did a great job, and I must say it was a great idea! My bedroom went from purple with yellow spots to two blue colors (blue sapphire and patch of blues, both dark colors but you can easil;y see the difference). Bathroom went from an unfinished pastel blue and white (ugh) to a black and white. The black part in only the door side, leaving three walls white. It's also not exactly black and white, but more about black and "soap" white. Yeah, it sounds weird, but once on the walls it's great! So thank you little sister and David!
Little story number two. Once back from Mont-Joli, my computer kept crashing over and over. I tried to fix it for several hours (between painting my rooms) and I tried a lot of things. Ultimately, I decided to open it and dismantle all of it, piece by piece.
Result: I will never underestimate the power of dust. It has magical properties.
There was so much of it I could remove chunks of it with my bare fingers. So I bought 2 compressed air cans and used both of them to do a clean job. Now my pc is all shiny, I had enough dust to do a ping-pong ball, and my pc is better than ever.
...Dust is our greatest enemy!
Well, the hardest part was the switch between day and night. I work night shifts, for those who doesn't know (I'm a night watchmen in a residence for people who suffers from mental illness. Nothing dangerous, in fact they are semi-autonomous and most can take care of themselves). I did the switch in a 2 days period too, so it was kind of swift. I also had a lot of work to do yesterday, going from garbage cans without bags in them (and more than full, why the hell not) to floors so dirty they were brown. I understand, it's winter, there's a lot of slush everywhere. Still, it's clear that nobody cleaned the floor at all for nearly two weeks. I also found some...errr... remnants of a substance on some door knobs. Happy stuff like that, just like any first day-back-from-a-long-break.
Also, yesterday, I officially got back into school. Well, I paid for it. I'm starting January 31 with only one class which is called LITTERATURE ET IMAGINAIRE and I definitely hate it. I failed it two times in a row and learned that music and anything else at the same time is not a good idea in college. So now, after more than three years of not going to school, I think it's time I repair the broken chips of my past. It'll surely feel all better after I fix these failures of my life...oh, and I'm not going back in music. I don't want to practice 5 hours each day for the rest of my life, so I'm going into writing :D
Aside from that, two little stories. Guess what my sister bought me for Christmas. She "hired" my best friend and they "helpfully forced me" into painting parts of my apartment. Me and my ex-girlfriend never found the time for this kind of project. The people who lived there had horrible tastes but I never bothered into doing this myself. Guess it was THAT pathetic if she had to "force" me.
Anyway, we did a great job, and I must say it was a great idea! My bedroom went from purple with yellow spots to two blue colors (blue sapphire and patch of blues, both dark colors but you can easil;y see the difference). Bathroom went from an unfinished pastel blue and white (ugh) to a black and white. The black part in only the door side, leaving three walls white. It's also not exactly black and white, but more about black and "soap" white. Yeah, it sounds weird, but once on the walls it's great! So thank you little sister and David!
Little story number two. Once back from Mont-Joli, my computer kept crashing over and over. I tried to fix it for several hours (between painting my rooms) and I tried a lot of things. Ultimately, I decided to open it and dismantle all of it, piece by piece.
Result: I will never underestimate the power of dust. It has magical properties.
There was so much of it I could remove chunks of it with my bare fingers. So I bought 2 compressed air cans and used both of them to do a clean job. Now my pc is all shiny, I had enough dust to do a ping-pong ball, and my pc is better than ever.
...Dust is our greatest enemy!
January 1, 2011
Minecraft Projects ( 1-1-2011 update!)
Soooo... Minecraft projects! let’s make a list:
The keep, which will become a workshop//barracks. Basement will be the workshops and storage, and the rest will be for the “troops”. Rooms will be Dining and Living room, sleeping quarters, armory, captain’s office, a small library, and a guard tower or two. There should be a training grounds area on the back, with targets and dummies.
A wheat farm, connected to a Reed farm further underground. The same water block will nourish both farms.
Vivariums, probably 3 or 4 of them. One for trees, another one for exotic plants (like cactus), and the other one for more, like mushrooms, or flowers, or whatever. Future plants added by Notch will be added in the future.
A tavern. Not much to say here, tables and chairs and etc.
A village. I’ll ask some key players to choose their locations before I open my map to the public (people like kin, ark, and etc.) Before that though, I’ll ask my rl friends to do their houses first, since most of them won’t be able to connect at all. Then, you can build wherever you want and my resources will be available to all, if Notch made it work. All houses should be constructed by roads that I’ll build and houses should have a maximum of 15x15 area. If you respect these rules horizontally, you can go as high or low as you want.
A mage tower. Why not, considering there will be magic and all. Redpowder should be stored there, as gold and all nether materials. The same mage tower could house the nether portal, or...
Nether temple, to house the portal. It should be large enough so that the annoying sound cannot be heard from the outside. Decorations and etc, blab la bla, next...
A Notch temple. To give your respects to the great Notch. Hey, everyone has the right to pray!
Cart tracks going everywhere, depends if it will be big enough or not.
And a castle. Maybe. Village is first priority anyway.
Well, that’s about it, so thank you for the suggestions! If you have anymore, just shoot them and I’ll rank them up. Still in vacation and away from a good PC, so I’ll go back into minecraft in a couple of days only. I still have to beat the Cotton Alley, but it shouldn’t take that much time.
Tx for the support! Please leave comments and click the “like” button on the bottom of this post, it helps a lot! I’ll probably do a fans mail answers or something, and I’ll take questions from everywhere. The blog is a perfect place for that. Happy Holidays!
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