League of Legends

This game has been consuming me for the past couple of months (along with Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Years hassles). So I apologize to those who actually read my posts for my delay in posting any new material.

League of Legends

A Short Description

The game is a champion based pvp game with RPG elements. Similar to DOTA (Death of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III) or DOTA2. I have not played either of those games so I can not give any more comparison other than I have heard from friends that they are similar just with a different champion/skill base.

Champion Selection:
You first choose a champion you would like to play as, two spells at the beginning of each 30-45 minute match, a mastery page, and a rune page.
Mastery Page–Your login avatar also gains experience and you win/lose matches, which gives you points to spend in categories similar to most RPG games. (1-30) points capped at level 30.
Rune Page–You can spend IP points or RP points that allow you to purchase ruins, which increase certain statistics of your champion. EX: Armor Penetration, Mana Regeneration, Health…
The Map:
The match begins with a nexus, towers and inhibitors for both teams evenly split up between the map. The destruction of the nexus is the goal, the towers defend along the multiple main pathways to the nexus and the destruction of an opposing inhibitor spawns super minions from your nexus that will make their way to attack the other team.
The Teams:
Your team is comprised of yourself and 2 or 4 other allied champions depending on the map and the opposing team consists of 3/5 champions.
Game Start: (Classic mode)
The game starts when minions are spawned from both your nexus and the opposing teams nexus and automatically travel down the 2-3 pathways towards the opposing teams nexus.

Why I find it such a good game

I plan on touching on a couple of points, which make this one of the better games out there right now. It is a better free to play game out there than the others for certain reasons and the competitiveness of the play is engrossing. If you enjoy games which are based more on skill and knowledge of the game rather than just button mashing than this is the game for you. The main drawback for me and any other working person is the time consumption. Each game is a nonstop competition for 30-45 minutes or even more.

League of Legends is free to play, which to any gamer who doesn’t have a loaded wallet, is a blessing. Although it is free to play, it still requires money (RP purchased from real currency) to purchase certain playable champions, skins (different character portraits or outfits), or boosts for XP or IP. This in my opinion does not give too much of an advantage because it does not involve the purchase of weapons or skills. This makes this Free to Play game much better than some of the other free games out there. Some of those games allow the people who pump money into the game to far outreach those who don’t have the funds or don’t wish to waste their money. There is also IP, which allows you to purchase the same boosts/skins or champions but you accrue these points at a much slower rate.

Although I am not too naturally competitive, I do get a kick out of doing well at competitive games. I like being the person at the top of the rankings at COD:MW2 (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) even if I am the only one who knows or really cares haha. In the end this game takes a great amount of skill and even though I have played upwards of 20+ 45 minute games I am still only barely better than a beginner. It takes time to learn how the different spells work and how you need to play the character in order to survive (or more importantly what champions you need to avoid). This makes the game very fun but also very frustrating at times. If you are a person who likes to play these types of games I would definitely give it a try. Or even if you don’t give it a try because its FREE!

Lastly, I really like the level of customization built into the game. It isn’t just a repeated dungeon thrasher of a game where you can hardly tell the difference level to level. You can customize your Rune Page, Mastery Page and Item Purchases and they make a significant difference from game to game.

Rune Page

You can purchase runes with IP or RP that allow you to increase basic combat statistics as follows: armor, health, mana, armor penetration, health regeneration, mana regeneration, magic damage, magic penetration, damage, attack speed, critical chance,…
The purchase of runes allows you to slowly improve your character in certain areas according to your play style. In the end it is a level of customization that is an important addition to the Mastery Page.

Mastery Page

This is where the main customization takes place. These can and do make a drastic difference to gameplay mainly because of the increased variety and value of improvements.

In the end this game is worth a go and is addictive as hell. I give it a B+ rating only because after a while it gets repetitive considering there are only a total of three different maps and two different playstyles. I am sure that more improvements are to come considering the league of legends is now 32 million people strong and counting.

Apple Iphone 4S

The one thing I want to comment about is Siri. The virtual assistant or avatar is the future of gaming consoles, as well as, all electronic devices. I touched upon this topic already in my post about the future of motion detection devices. The one thing I did not think about in this post about facial recognition is voice recognition. Being able to walk into your home and say “Xbox on , call of duty Black Ops Multiplayer” or “PS3 on, Final Fantasy XIII” should definitely be developed.

The one question it all boils down to in the end is the effectiveness of this technology. On other devices I have attempted to use their voice detection systems but in the end they all failed to really recognize my voice both correctly and above other ambient noises. What has changed with Siri and will it step up to the challenge and become an integral part of our lives in near future?

USA Today Article
Apple Website iPhone 4S

Wii U

The Wii Future for U

I for one think that including the tablet in with console gaming is an excellent idea. In essence they effectively combined the DS and the Wii along with HD graphics (upgradable to 3D graphics for tablet controller in the future? perhaps). The current craze in gaming however is FPS and I still don’t think this will allow for better gameplay, the good old handheld controller still trumps anything else out their for sheer precision.

That being said it definitely could open up a whole new world of cooperative gameplay. New Zelda/Mario cooperative gaming, along with childhood board gaming, battleship, a whole plethora of things I can’t begin to imagine. Who wouldn’t want to be able to play an Angry Birds type game on their big screen TV and then when friends come over and want to watch something else but you really want to keep playing you can just switch it over to the handheld.

Cooperative Gaming. It has declined DRASTICALLY in recent years. I remember when gaming with friends was the pinnacle of the weekend. Large gaming companies now require you to have multiple copies of the games or multiple consoles connected through your home network each with an additional copy of the game. This could eliminate that need. One would only need to bring over their controller in order to play/try out a game that belongs to someone else.

Lastly, I am unsure whether something like this could take hold in the Western world but imagine say instead of everyone having their own IPad/Iphone, people carried their gaming consoles CONTROLLERS to replace them. Or console developers teamed up with Tablet manufacturers. People already download their textbooks in ebook format, highlight and take notes in class, watch YouTube, surf the internet, play games with their tablets. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are already teaming up with Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO GO…it is only a matter of time before large cable companies try to team up with them as well. This could allow for a wireless phone/internet package linked with your gaming account. So you can talk with friends, game, surf the web AND watch your favorite channels/saved shows all from your Gaming Tablet. If it isn’t already going to be the future it should be. It opens up an entire world of possibilities.

Links:
Wii–
EnGadget Wii Information
E3 Nintendo Information
Blog Everything Wiiublog

Motion Sensor/Detection in Gaming

OR

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PS Move, Xbox Kinect, Wii Motion Plus. I for one am not that big a fan of the current craze for motion detection/. I understand that everything needs to start somewhere but I just do not see where it is going to go from here. Are people really going to become more active while playing video games? The act of gaming is traditionally the art of sedentary adventure. Exploring the senses from the safety of ones cushy couch!

It’s place now in the gaming industry: Dancing games, simple movement games (wii tennis/sports), Fitness, FPS (still needs tweaking in order to actually be considered worthy…the delay is what kills this for me). I truly believe that it was an effort by both PlayStation and XBox to increase their sales to the younger generations. These tending to be the people who wish to learn how to dance with the TV screen or get their parents to play with them. There are also those who believe buying this and the Fitness Game would give them more incentive to work out (pshh). Its other main draw is its flavoring of current games. For example playing Zelda and spinning your wiimote to complete a attack, using your hand to turn the dashboard of an xbox…you get the idea. This adds flavor to a game that does not rely on the motion detection device alone. At least for the people I know they bought a Kinect or Move because they loved the concept of being more involved with their games but quickly realized that the games that utilized even a portion of it still required the majority of the game play on the traditional controllers and those games that relied entirely on the Kinect/Move fell far short of their expectations.

It’s place in the future (or atleast where I see it becoming useful): I believe it will forever be just a flavoring device but in the future a perfected/more advanced one. The following are my ideas on what they could do to flavor-enhance games/consoles and electronics of the future with their motion devices:

Example 1: Having an avatar be on Xbox dashboard that would interact with you based on the detection of multiple people, male/female, what you are wearing (sports gear, music t-shirts, nothing, etc) and crack jokes about the things it detects or start discussions with you based on what you were watching or playing, gauge your reactions and then continue or stop accordingly. Lets say I was with a group of friends and it could detect that we were all guys and then crack a joke saying “where are all the females here, oh ya I forgot you guys are forever alone gamers, j/k , j/k” or something along those lines. Or you just got done playing Dead Space 2 and it goes on to tell you that you were scared as hell during these parts (and then the detection device had a camera and snapped a picture of you scared shitless during a scary part) show you the picture and crack a joke. This would seem like true interaction and draw tons of people to the console simply for the avatar. This is why I believe if Xbox can perfect its device before the other two can find a way to perfect theirs in a similar way they will definitely be on top. On another note this could also be used for Xbox’s advantage if there were conversation and dialogue options you could choose when talking to the avatar. In the console OS updates it could update the avatar to your own personal tastes in essence customizing what it says to you based on your personality and reaction to it. Talk about more personal things then in so doing recommend different games to you/communities/video chat and so on. I hope to see something like this in the future of face recognition software.

This could also branch out into individual games and change the replay ability based on the actual type of person you are. So you are playing L.A. Noire and they show you a picture of a grisly murder and you squirm your face and look away. The Kinect (of the future) detects this action and based on that decides what your detective buddy says to you. “horrible isn’t it boss” or if you were stone-cold the character says “Seen plenty of these havn’t we boss”. Something simple like this could make for some amazing game-play. (now that I am on a rant I am gonna take it a step further) Imagine, say, face recognition/motion detection for every electronic device. So you log into facebook (computer motion detection/face recognition) and low and behold there is an avatar waiting to chat with you and detect what you are doing/analyze and then discuss, mention or comment. Or say in the future you walk into your home and since by then our walls could have OLED tvs all over the place you can have mini little tvs hooked up to a home network then hooked to the home computer, etc and that avatar will discuss your day with you, mention that you left the light on in the bathroom and it turned it off for you because it detected no movement. Tells you how much electricity you’ve used this month, how much water, little jimmy was looking at porn and whacked it on the kitchen table, all sorts of things. You tell it to turn on the discovery channel and order you the usual from the usual place and put it on credit card number 1.

This in my mind is the future and a grand crazy awesome thing its going to be (unless it turns on us).

Example 2: To be vague, thought provoking games or puzzle games. Puzzle solving games based on unique skills you need to use only with more advanced motion detection or rather fine-tuned. Lets say you are playing in a game where you need to use a magnifying glass to detect something. So you move your hand in front of your eye and create a circle like the old school telescope trick then it zooms in for you. You need to cross the river and find out the correct hand movements that will make you swim, or swim faster through a faster current. Block out the sun creating a glare with your hand as a visor. Swipe away papers on a desk that have caught fire. Blow out a candle/flick off a flashlight because someone is coming and you are rifling through papers in a castle/police department. I think you get the idea, timing based game-play. They could bring back the unique puzzle games using this type of action. In essence a game similar to Myst but without just using mouse clicks you use hand motions and you make the story really involved. Similar to Heavy Rain or remake Bladerunner with stunning graphics and have the main character solve puzzles using only motion, memory and smarts without a controller.

These are some of the futures I see for this kind of device. Let me know your opinions or where you think they will be headed. Do you think we will ever get to the point of virtual reality? 360 degree visual experience? Do you think gaming will start to involve smells/touch along with visuals? I am interested to hear what other people have to say so hopefully someone finds this topic interesting.

Till next time,
-Blog Da Damn Game

Other’s thoughts on motion detection in the gaming industry:

http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/mischa/archive/2007/07/12/the-future-of-games-and-other-interfaces.aspx

DOSbox

DOSBox is a DOS emulator (not sure if emulator is correct terminology). I just wanted to write a quick post about this WONDERFUL thing. Similar to SNES, NES, SEGA and other emulators this basically gives you the ability to run many of the old games on current operating systems. I use windows VISTA and windows 7 with DOSBox and am able to play anything I download.

Abandonia.com is the site where I download a lot of free games such as all of the Quest for Glory Games, Kings Quest Games, Bladerunner and much more.

For those that have a love of old games and can never get them to work on a newer system even with the ‘Compatability’ option, DOSBox is the way to go.

Just wanted to give a quick shoutout to those that have been wanting to find a way to play these games but didn’t know how.

First Person Shooter Question: Is it better to use a higher joy stick/cursor sensitivity?

I currently am on a Modern Warfare 2 binge and have upped my sensitivity to the highest it can go. My thought was that if I became good at this then I would technically be able to target and eliminate players in the fastest way possible.

My question to the pros is as follows; does it really matter what your sensitivity is? or is it mainly just how much you are accustomed to a certain sensitivity level.

I am now better at targeting players than I ever was before but this could also just be a byproduct of me playing more and just becoming better at the game in general. In my opinion being skilled at a higher sensitivity is the way to go because it is just THAT much faster than the other sensitivities. It will give you that split second to fire at your opponent before he can fire on you.

Achievement Points: a necessary addition to all games!

There are many reasons why an Achievement System is a must have for any modern gaming console but I will focus on what I know are the three main reasons things an  Achievement System brings to the gaming world.

• The Reward Phenomenon
• Added Gameplay
• Perfectionists just CAN NOT put the controller down

First, the Reward Phenomenon.  It is a well known fact that people like to get rewarded for their time and effort put into anything from overtime at work to always going to that same coffee shop to fill up your points card and get an extra “free” coffee.  For games like Bioshock, Fallout III, Fable, GTA Games,  the Halo Series and many more, you feel good when you completed a challenge and see that little box on the upper part of the screen telling you how many points you have been rewarded.  I alone have spent hours using different weapons in Call of Duty, just to get that extra experience reward when I complete the challenges.  People play longer, on harder difficulties, or repeat menial tasks in games (find and kill all of the pigeons in Grand Theft Auto) because they want to be rewarded with those points.  People love to be rewarded for their dedication and Achievement Points gives them that feeling of being rewarded even though in reality you aren’t rewarded with anything but a number.  This number however, ties into the perfectionist aspect I will discuss in detail later.

Second,  Achievement Points add more to the gameplay experience.  Many gamers before the addition of AP(achievement points) would only play through a game once and then be done with it.  I am guilty of this as well.  I usually would burn through a game for the storyline and then never return to it.  Now I find myself looking through the achievements and playing on harder difficulties the first time through so I can get all of the AP for the entire spectrum of difficulty levels.  One for instance sticks out in my mind and this is with Bioshock I and II.  I played through the game without using the respawn feature and played on the hardest difficulty.  I also tried my damnedest to get all of the achievement points my first play through, which required me to search through each level meticulously, save each of the adam collector girls and so on.  It is a fact that  AP adds to the gameplay for each game.  It in essence is adding a whole array of sidequests and mini-goals into each game.  For many Gamers this gives them more incentive to play the games a lot longer than before.  They will spend hours doing something not even involved with the main storyline in order to get that 10 point achievement.  On many occasions especially in RPG games, you can’t get all of the achievement points with one play through.  One must play through the game using different mechanics, as a different class or with different group of NPC’s.   AP definitely adds to overall gameplay.  Where once you would play a game only to complete the main storyline, now there is incentive to keep replaying the games.

Third, Perfectionism.  Unfortunately (maybe fortunately IDK) a lot of gamers are perfectionists when it comes to the games they play.  They want to run those games ragged and get as much gameplay out of them as possible.  A friend of mine has a hard time putting a game down if he doesn’t have all of the achievement points.  He will collect each set of armor in a game, even collect ever object and make a point to beat a game into perfection.  Achievement points separate the dedicated gamer from the recreational gamer.  I for one could never spend hours upon hours grinding away at menial tasks in these games in order to reach perfection and get all of the AP.   There are many different gamers out there and AP gives a person a multitude of reasons to keep picking that game back up and playing it again and again.  If you want to have a way to get the most out of your games and feel like spending that 60 dollars was worth it, beat the game and get all of the achievement poitns attached to it.  This is truly the way to be a perfectionist gamer.  Without AP there was no way to rate yourself as a better or more dedicated gamer than any other (outside of the PvP arena) now however AP gives us that extra edge.  It allows us to rate ourselves and this in itself taps into every persons innate competitive spirit.  You want to be known as the one at the top of the charts, the one who has beaten every game they played into perfection and are the BEST gamer out there.

To conclude, Achievement Points are an amazing addition to the modern gaming industry.  Giving a reward system to gaming was genius and has only added to the overall gameplay experience.  The gamer now has more incentive to play certain games longer and in ways they weren’t used to before.  The perfectionist now has a way to fully “beat” a game and can separate himself from others and AP can even persuade them to play games outside of their normal genres so they can beat their friends Gamerscore.