LOTRO Helegrod raid induces coma

You can't blame me. Because I'm still a lowly level 55 in Lord of the Rings Online I'm not big enough yet to join my kin for instance runs in the recent Moria expansion.

So when I was invited last night to return to Helegrod (one of the two main raids in LOTRO) for some Worm slicing and Giant mashing I gratefully accepted. The first hour was fun, considering I had not played with my kin-mates since Moria had been released. I even managed to complete one of my raid quests left in my log (woot!).

Have you heard of Listerine Thorog?

After that however, the usual fatigue started to set in. It was a quite relaxed session, most of the raid (which there were twenty of us) know Hele intimately and were also level 60. Perhaps that was the problem, or maybe it wasn't. Raids in LOTRO (providing they go smoothly) usually take four, maybe five hours including the final boss, sometimes a bit longer. Because they are so long, your raid has a few days in which to complete it by acquiring raid locks so they can continue where they left off.

But what usually happens (at least in my kin) is that the main brunt of the grind gets done in one evening (can be a good four hours) to finish all the mini-bosses. Then the final boss (Thorog the resurrected Drake in Hele, or Thaurlach the giant Balrog in The Rift) is dealt with on another night.

My conclusion from last night's visit to Helegrod (where I have visited at least half a dozen times) is that I don't really like raiding much and can see why a lot of gamers raid just for the high end gear. There is another benefit of course. It is nice to be part of such a large group of your fellow kin and as long as the raid is going smoothly, it can be quite a social affair.

After ninety minutes of heavy grind though, I realised I had slipped into a drunken-like stupor waving the mouse around in a vague dreary way wondering why the mouse pointer had become randomly jittery, aching from a sore hand and very weary of how the frame rate was chugging along. With twenty players fighting waves of spiders and worms, there is also far too much action going on at once, the screen becoming very messy and jerky and difficult to make out. I had also found myself playing my own game, seeing how little interaction I could actually get away with without dying or being told off, in this strange world of repetitious point-and-click that we spend so many hours of our lives in.

In my distorted version of an ideal world, raid sessions would not last longer than a couple of hours and no more than say twelve players at a time.

Falin plays on the EU server Laurelin (sometimes).

Free trial GTA IV Live party week!

Don't get me wrong, Grand Theft Auto IV is one hell of game. After the bloated but light-hearted zany comedy of GTA III:San Andreas, GTA IV returned to it's roots - the darker more serious mafia infested New York. Oh, sorry I meant Liberty City. With a new game engine to take advantage of next-gen tech, Liberty City had never looked or felt so gorgeous. The game is a lot darker and grittier, the main character Nico can be more sympathised with and the cars handling is a lot heavier - grounding their existence to the game world more thoroughly.

But once the gloss became less of a novelty, it did feel to me like the same old GTA. Number Four had inherited the series' greatness but also it's flaws, perhaps the biggest of which being returned back to the start of a long chained mission that you had repeatedly failed already four or five times. Added to that my relentless attraction to what my PC can offer (Lord of the rings Online, Trackmania, Blogging, Surfing etc etc), well my 360 started gathering dust a couple of months after GTA IV had been released, uncompleted.

I only came out for some milk!

However, to celebrate the release of The Lost and Damned (The first GTA IV new content chapter exclusive to 360) M$ are letting Live gamers play GTA IV multiplayer for free all this week (17th-22nd Feb). What great timing I thought, as I had planned to have a GTA IV session this week anyway (see previous post) and I had not yet tried GTA IV on Multiplayer. I refuse to pay M$ for the privilege of playing multiplayer on my 360, especially when I have a PC that I can play most of the same games for free.

Hesitantly I chose Deathmatch, the other many game modes did not seem to have any participants at the time (10am!). After getting quickly killed five times while adjusting to this strange new multiplayer environment, I started to recollect the controls and got drawn into Liberty City...

Two hours vanished in a blink of an eye, wow! I have not had this much fun playing, well anything for years. Do you remember how exciting Deathmatch Doom was all those years ago when MP was in it's infancy? Everything was new, exploring new strategies and contemplating all the limitless possibilities. Well GTA IV MP is there. It is just so refreshing being in an open vast living city in a multiplayer game and not having a First-Person-Perspective like most other Deathmatch games.

From stalking parks to building sites strafing your rifle as you go or firing rockets along main street Downtown or maybe grabbing a car to ram your opponent or get involved in a car chase shoot out through the city. The big gunfight in the movie Heat springs to mind. All this action is going on in the same map. Some bugger even found a helicopter from somewhere! The fact GTA IV also introduced 'Hide-behind' to the series a la Gears of War also adds to the action. I thought the play area would be cordoned off for MP for more focused play, but the expansive city works because you can see your enemies location on the on-screen radar so everybody just homes in on each other. It's a blast! Even if you do find yourself a few blocks away from the action, it's not like you have to run in GTA ;). DeathMatch seems to suit Sandbox gaming very well indeed if GTA IV is anything to go by...

My xbox live gamer tag is matty080476

The cat is away, time to play!

Don't worry I have not given up on my blog just yet, I'm in it for the long haul (as everything in life I reckon!). I'm trying to keep my blogs at least half-interesting (don't be mean) instead of the rubbish I post on Shannonlan! :)

Oh bugger I just did.

I also found out that Twitter is fully compatible with Facebook, so you can still tweet to your mates that don't use Twitter by automatically updating your facebook status. Excellent!

Expecting some GTAIV action soon now I have access to the main TV. Even Spring is in the air what with the temp rising back to it's usual 10 degrees Centigrade, so I'm in better spirits this week! :D

Falin posts regularly on the gaming board ShannonLan

Farewell CounterStrike

I fired up Counter-Strike for the first time in ages the other night, and as the saying goes "I got pwned!".

Perhaps it was just the server I picked as there were only a handful of people playing the classic de_dust2 map, but I was terrible and very out of practice. After an hour of perseverance I realised I was not enjoying myself and starting to scream at the monitor, so I logged.

Perhaps CS' time has finally come. Even the current version CS:Source (which was released a few years ago shortly after Half-Life 2) seemed rather dated to me, although Source was essentially the same game as the original but with a graphical overhaul. But you can't say goodbye to such a giant game without fanfare.

I keep dying, take that Barrel!

It was a simple idea, a team of Terrorists against the Counter-Terrorists playing in slightly different scenarios within wildly different parts of the world. But the games' success hinged on its very realistic and authentic action. Using real world weapons and SWAT themed manoeuvres, one bullet aimed at you in the right place meant game over - no shrugging off nail storms and dodging rockets here. You would have to watch the remainder of the game waiting for the outcome before you could start playing again. Even though most games only lasted a few minutes, this fact put off many players that wanted straight back in after they had died.

But there was something special about CS, something that soon made it the number one Internet action game for many years. When Valve (the creators of Half-Life) launched Steam, their innovative content network, they also took on the development of CS (originally a fan-mod). Version 1.6 could only be played on Steam evoking an outcry from many die-hard fans. But Steam proved very successful at providing consistent updates and network play.

When asked "What's your favourite game of all time?" Counter-Strike for me, has to be right up there rubbing shoulders with the big boys, the likes of X-wing, even the mighty Streetfighter II. Indeed, CS' achievement is certainly impressive from what spawned as a homebrew mod to the original Half-Life way back in 1999.

"Fire in the hole!"

More info about Counter-Strike's history

Twitter me this, twitter me that...

If you live in the UK, the chances are that Twitter has come up in conversation this week due to a sudden explosion in its profile within the media.

Indeed, its promotion has been helped in no small part by a number of celebrities championing its use wherever they go. The latest celeb Chris Moyles, Radio 1 breakfast show DJ performed live on air a kind of love-twitter-triangle feature with fellow twitterers Philip Schofield and Andy Peters.



So what is Twitter? I've had a go and the best way to describe it is a status messenger, that just takes Facebook's status update feature into a much simpler and minimalist format. I can see why it's popular with celebrities as they can very quickly promote themselves to their legions of fans with minimal effort.

I think it's a rather charming little program, especially compared to the bloated and slothenly Facebook. Another great feature is that you can send updates via your mobile with SMS texts free of charge (you just pay your network's standard charge) making the whole concept much more meaningful, providing you are doing something interesting of course!

"Following your favourite celebrities" sounds vulgar, but surprisingly very entertaining when put into practice. In fact reading Stephen Fry's mini-crisis about buying a manbag from the airport yesterday and getting derided by his followers was hilarious as was Alan Carr's advice not to brave the snow as he 'did a Todd Carty in front of Londis'. You could almost say top-drawer entertainment, well for the office.

Actually, celebrity-following is pretty much all I can do until I get some followers of my own as I have had trouble convincing friends to have a look. I would advise you to throw away your preconceptions and just try it for a few days - for the sake of in-office entertainment.

www.twitter.com/mattjohnbrady

Left4Dead pushes co-op play to the fore

Valve (the makers of Half life) launched the rather excellent Left4Dead a few months back and now I have had a few sessions on it I can confirm I am rather pleased with it.

Only available on Valve's network Steam, L4D is a fast paced FPS set in a zombie infested survivor scenario. The main gut of the game is split into four campaigns and take around an hour to complete. You have the aid of three other companions to help you make your escape from the massing hordes onto a suitable vehicle such as a helicopter or boat.

"Get Thee back Satan!"

I was not particularly impressed with the game initially as I made the mistake of choosing single player (creating your companions as AI controlled). But playing solo is not what this game is all about and to Valve's credit L4D is almost entirely based on co-operative play. At the time of writing the servers are still quite active, so if you are a bit of a Billy-No-Mates like me you can easily find a game of like-minded players to join, though you may find yourself in the middle of a campaign and so end up with less score.

But L4D is best played with your mates as I discovered last week. The in-game voice chat makes communication a doddle and you won't have time to argue as you will be too busy fending off the zombies and saving each other's necks. Every game plays out slightly different too, as the zombies have a number of different places where they can spring from, designed of course to scare the shit out of you!

All things considered, it's a perfect hour of entertainment if you can round up some mates.