Play Time

Now that I finally have my new budget-ranged computer, I find that I'm in a bit of a slump as to which computer games to play.

World of Warcraft really offers me very little, and I'll explain why. At the moment, I'm still signed up to the European servers but, because I'm 6 hours ahead, I rarely get to meet with the players I used to hang out with. As I'm in a guild, I do get to meet up with other players, but generally there is very little comraderie between them and myself. I say hi, they say hi, we go do different things, etc.

The other real issue is that most of my guildmates have moved onto daily raiding. Karazhan (yes, that guild breaker) requires that players spend a lot of time in the dungeon to clear it out - this requires at least 4 days out of every 7 raiding there. Since I can barely spend 2 days online, I just don't have the ability to go there. Ever.

So, in order to inject a bit of fun, I decided to give Knights of the Old Republic a go. KOTOR is a Star Wars game, set about 4000 years before the films. It was great fun. Hand a man a lightsaber and he turns into a whimpering kid. Hand him a double-bladed lightsaber and he turns into an even bigger whimpering kid. In the game, you get to choose whether or not you want to be a Jedi or a Sith, based on your actions and the consequences of those actions. It only took me 2 weeks but I plowed through it.

The current game I'm playing is Fable: The Lost Chapters. Essentially a roleplaying game, the choices (and thus like KOTOR the consquences) you make effectively determine your appearance. If you play like a baddie, you look like a baddie. If you get a scar during a fight, you keep that scar for that character. Scars and tattoos accumulate during a character's lifetime thereby demonstrating how your life has been led.

It all looks good so far with some interesting gameplay but one thing I did not realise was that combat was in real time. KOTOR's combat was real time too but you could pause the combat and plan out your choices.

I'm not that particularly fond of real time combat, especially in fantasy settings where you have to block, roll or swing a sword but so far it looks fairly easy. And of course you have the easy options of using archery (move the crosshairs over the target whilst drawing the arrow back) or magic.

But I'm still hankering for some MMO action. And the only game that keeps me interested is City of Heroes. Now, I know I've posted before about COH, and that the Customer Support was fairly bad, but damn it, it still looks like a cool game.