Most Enjoyed: 2012

Sure, it's coming way after I promised it, but here it is none the less.

Mists of Pandaria - I'm currently taking a break from WoW because I'm tired of farming in games (ironically, I love the little farm you can get in the game now). But a great expansion! I'd be more interested if I had a good raid team/schedule, but in the absence of that. I'm ok without playing for now.

Starcraft 2 - I managed to get a feel of being more involved in the game this past year. Great game. Great community. Expect more great things to come.

Dungeon Defenders - I got freaking hooked on this for a couple of months! Still a great way to burn a few hours.

Guild Wars 2 - Content patches are coming out all the time for GW2. You should definitely take a look if you're in the mood for a good MMO w/o wanting to pay a subscription.

Age of Empires Online - Still fun, but after playing SC2 the gameplay itself feels slow and stale.

Punch Quest/Ski Safari/Road Trip 2 - I love these side-scrolling runner games. Extra props to Ski Safari for having the catchiest music.

Amnesia: The Dark Decent - Aubrey and I finally got brave and started playing through this game. And then we got a big tv. And then we played it on the big tv. And then we decided we were better off just watching Day9's playthrough.  By far one of the creepiest games I've ever played. Great mechanics.

Nastolgia:
Chrono Trigger/Majora's Mask/FF3(6) - Got these babies on the Wii Virtual Console and I play them on the treadmill. Great multitasking!!

Positive Experience #4

Got it!

I was asked to cast some of the first matches for Six Pool Gaming's tournament! In Spanish! Ha! I love that it's in Spanish. I start tomorrow. Maybe one day I'll work my way up to English, but Spanish is still a lot of fun. I'll post a link when it's showtime. I'm really grateful that they're giving me a shot.

Speaking of grateful, I am so glad the presidential election is finally over here in America. It's just so long and drawn out and exhausting. I'm going to have to go through Facebook now and unblock all of the people who couldn't keep it nice over the past several months. My Dad's really lucky he didn't get blocked. He wouldn't be able to get away with that stuff on my Feed if he were anyone else. Anyway, I'm super glad it's over. Maybe now we can all just try to get along. I'm being optimistic there, but I really wish that were the way it worked. All we can do is try to find what is helpful for the most people. If people tried to see what they had in common with each other and actually treat other people like people, I think we would have a lot less problems.

Anyway, back to Starcraft. I cast my first series of games in Spanish today. It was a blast! I'm still in the process of learning the names for everything but it shouldn't be too bad. I'm not 100% sure that I'm ready for the matches tomorrow because I can't get my normal account to run in a Spanish version of the game. Blizzard's language support is apparently known for being kind of sucky, but I don't want to pay for another copy of the game. That would be kind of awful. Either way, I'm excited for my first real gig casting Starcraft matches. It should be a party.

Imma cut this post short so I can put in a few links. I hope everyone is having a great week and that we can all try to stay positive.

---------

Here's the games I did in Spanish. I was streaming it as part of my ReHacked series so all the technical goofs are still in there. Feedback is always appreciated!

MLGSCE is Official!

I've finally done it! I've cast six professional level game and uploaded the videos to my YouTube page. I'll embed the one I think is best here. I was super nervous doing this at first but I felt like I was just getting better and better as I went. Not that hard after all!

DOTA 2 Giveaway results!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Tyler and Justin both won a copy of DOTA 2! Congrats to them and I hope they have a great time playing. Hopefully Steam (or anyone else who may feel generous) will keep sending things my way so we can do more giveaways.

Last day for DOTA 2

Hey. Today's the last day to register for the DOTA 2 giveaway. You MUST have signed up using the widget to qualify. Click anywhere on this first paragraph for details. 

Secondly, I casted my first two pro Starcraft 2 games. There is definitely room for improvement. But I'll keep it up. You can check them out on my YouTube channel. Feel free to comment if you had any constructive feedback.

Thirdly, remember when I was all like, "I'm making a video game plan and I'm sticking to it!" That's been going pretty well so far. Granted, I decided to switch back to Zerg this morning because it's just better. But other than that things have been going pretty smoothly.

The Great MikeySCE DOTA 2 Giveaway!

DOTA 2!

I have two copies of DOTA 2 to give away so we're going to have the first-ever giveaway on the site. Here's how it's going to work.

• TWO winners will each receive ONE free copy of DOTA 2 through Steam.
• In order to enter, all you have to do is subscribe for email updates for the blog and share this post on Facebook.
• You will need to use the widget on the bottom of this post to enter.
• If you cheat on the widget I'll be able to tell and you will not win. 
• The contest will end at 12:01 a.m. EST on Tuesday October 30th.
• After the contest is over, I'll compare those who entered using the widget to the list of subscribers to determine eligible entries and, using a random number generator, pick two winners from the list. 
• I'll contact the winners through email to get a confirmation and then send them an email that containing a coupon for the game. You will need Steam on your computer to play this game.
• Also, this is my first time doing this, so I'm sorry if I completely screw this thing up. But I don't think I will. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Mists of Pandaria: Haters Gonna Hate

Just my luck to devote a blog to Starcraft just as a WoW expansion comes out.

If someone's really all that curious about Mists, there's about a million sites and videos they could watch, so I'm going to make this a pretty simple review.

1. The new continent has a great sense of presence for the player and the environments and music are all fantastic.The Pandaren and other new races all look great and fit right in with the game.

2. The Monk is good. I've been leveling up a tanking monk and it feels fresh and fun. Thumbs up to the Monk.

3. Questing is better than ever. There are several driving story lines that I promise are not "juvenile" or whatever it is that people are so worried about since there are giant pandas. There was one quest line in involving some raccoons that was particularly good.

3.5. The factions are all pretty cool so far and give awesome mounts when you hit exalted. And they're even going to buff reputation gains for alts soon. That's going to be pretty great. Unless of course your enjoyment of the game depends on things taking a long time so you can gloat that you have it and other people don't. Then you'll hate that. And pretty much everything else in life as well.

4. Pet Battles = awesome. Sure it's a total Pokemon ripoff, but anyone who played Pokemon back in the day knows it was a great game and it's nice to have it incorporated into WoW. I know I'm really enjoying it.

5. And the big one: there's a ton to do once you hit level cap. There's lots of rep to get. There's two new battlegrounds coming out. There's the pet battles. There's three raids plus LFR coming soon. There's a bunch of heroics as well as scenarios (shorter, more story-driven, dungeons). There's challenge modes (special versions of dungeons for speed runs and exclusive loot). There are world bosses that drop raid loot. There's the Black Market Auction House. And Blizzard's already about to put the new patch on the Test Realm with even more new content. The future looks bright!

All in all, people who want to whine will do so. The rest of us are having a great time.

P.S. Here's my main dude. He's a stud.

Bonus pic:

Mike's Starcraft Story

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Alaskan in need of anything at all must be in want of a Costco. Seriously. They really do. When I was growing up we looked forward to going to Costco more than we did the mall (this is still true for me). We even got a lot of our clothes there. And I definitely bought all my computer games at Costco.

This is The Costco of my youth. Google Street View will
get you right into the parking lot!

In the early summer of 1998, I began to hear rumors of two new games. Unreal and Starcraft. I was a little more excited about Unreal because I the graphics were supposed to be amazingly awesome. Starcraft looked cool too, but I already had Warcraft 2 and Red Alert and I figured it couldn't possibly be better than those.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend with both of them. I went over and we tried them out. Unreal was, just like I expected, completely awesome. The guns all did more than one thing. And you could aim up and down, in addition to left and right. Then we tried out Starcraft.

Starcraft blew my mind. The three races were fundamentally different from each other. The campaign was full voiced acted with a dramatic storyline. The Terrans were funny, the Protoss were mysterious, and the Zerg were scary. There was blood! When you used nukes, they actually blew things up! (This was Red Alert's major downfall.) To the point: I had to have this game. My friend let me borrow it (what a pal!)  so I could show it to my brother or something. And we proceeded to play the crap out of it for about a week. We went all the way through the storyline, cheated like crazy in skirmishes against the AI, and I even gave it a whirl online. I got my butt handed to me, of course, and we only had one phone line at the time so that complicated things a little. Then Friend wanted it back. Boo.

So my brother, Dave, and I hatched a plan. We'd save all our money and the next time we went to Costco he would get Unreal and I would get Starcraft. Somehow this happened pretty quickly. I'm not sure how we ended up with $80 together but I distinctly remember us having a budgeting summit where we had all of our money (and all the money we could find) lined up in piles on our bedroom floor. Now that I think about it, I think I was a little short and Dave gave me another $5 or so. That's a good brother for you. A few days later, we heard the magic words: "We have to go to Costco."

We went. I had done my homework too. There were three different covers for Starcraft, one of each race. There also appeared to be a re-release of some kind because the version with the three different races was rated M, while the originals (of just the Protoss cover) were rated Teen. I definitely had to get the Teen one. I was 11 at the time, so I guess I wasn't going to try and get away with any more than I had to. Game ratings were so new then I don't think my parents even knew to look. Either way, I got the Teen rated Protoss box, Dave got Unreal, we paid, ate Costco pizza (why wouldn't you?) and we headed for home!

I recall few drives home from Costco more joyous than that one. We both had awesome games in tow and each had a good manual with lots of info in them. We read our own manuals, switched, and then switched back. It was the best of times.

That's when things started going downhill.

Unreal, it turns out, wouldn't run on our computer because it didn't have enough RAM or something. That sucked. Then, two days later, my mom overheard Arcturus Mengsk swearing up a storm during a campaign mission and she said I had to return it! CURSE YOU MENGSK! It got worse from there. Mom then mobilized The Mom Grapevine and pretty soon all the moms in our neighborhood knew that Starcraft had cussing in it and all the kids were getting in trouble. I didn't take too much flak for it in the end, but it was sad knowing that I had blown it for everyone.

I was now Starcraftless. At the beginning of the next year, I heard about Brood War coming out but didn't get to play it until three years later (at that same friend's house). I wasn't even aware of the pro scene or anything. And I spent a few years being obsessed with the Final Fantasy series. But that nostalgic feeling came back when I heard that a Starcraft 2 was approaching. Naturally, I pirated it off the internet and playing through the campaign again. It...hadn't aged well. Still awesome, but pretty ugly by 2008.

Starcraft 2 happened a couple years later and I bought it the first week it came out. Thinking back, I should have sprung for the collector's edition, but whatever. After a few weeks of playing the campaign and messing around against the computer, I decided to go online and see if I could get some tips. I found a lot of tips. I also found the infamous Husky, The Starcast, Day[9], Teamliquid, and the Global Starcraft League. This was when Starcraft became much more than a game to me. It was a skill and an art with a huge community of players and followers. For lack of a better word: it's a sport. The first computer game to make eSports a real thing in my mind. The first sport I ever really cared to follow and be a part of.

Sure, I've had some long spans of time between actually playing the game and I'm still in Bronze league, but I've finally decided on one race and I'm determined to start climbing that ladder! I bought the digital edition of Starcraft with Brood War a few months ago to finally make good on it (it's even uglier after playing SC2). I even wrote a critique of it for a term paper last year. I am psyched for Heart of the Swarm and want to get into some casting once I have some better game understanding. There's totally some wing places near my apartment where I'm hoping to get some BarCrafts going in the next couple months. Watch for it on this blog!

Also, should you come by a Heart of the Swarm beta key, feel free to send it my way.

Guild Wars 2: MMO relief!

I've done nothing for the past week except my homework and play Guild Wars 2. Mostly just Guild Wars 2 though.

"What?" you may ask. What's a total Blizzard fanboy doing spending so much time playing GW2? Isn't that Panda thing coming out next week? I'll tell you what I've been doing: enjoying it completely.

I'm just going to launch into the things I like about it. Keep in the mind the only MMOs I've played a lot of are WoW and AOE:Online.

Character creation is a lot more elaborate than other games I've played. (I know that City of Heroes apparently had the best creation ever, but I never got around to that one.)

Personalized story arch. I love this so much. For the first 30 levels, the story arch is dependent upon your character and choices you made during character creation. There are splitting paths during each possible story as well, adding even more variety. There are little cutscenes in this game too, which I think is kind of cute more than anything, but certainly effective for the narrative.

Attacks and abilities change with weapons/attunements/kits. This is one of my favorite features by far. You don't just learn moves as you level, you have a different set of moves for each possible weapon configuration (as well as another set for underwater) that can be swapped out on the fly. Add dodging and lots of positional abilities and you've got yourself a game where you actually feel like you're fighting something and not just mashing number keys.

You level for everything except mob grinding. Well, you get experience for killing mobs, but it is probably the least efficient form of leveling. Quests, crafting, PvP, and crafting are all emphasized to be something you can jump into at any moment and feel "productive" as far as character progression goes. I think this freedom is the driving factor for why the game feels so fresh and new.

Dynamic quest events add a great sense of urgency to questing. It also brings every player in your vicinity together to do something epic together, which is just a better way to play.

Quality of life improvements for the economically minded. Crafting materials taking up all the bag space? Just press a button to send them to your account-wide collectibles bank. Seriously. Why isn't this feature in every game? I love it. Need to check the Auction House (or in this case, the Trading Post) just press the "O" button on your keyboard and you can buy and post away. No need to head to town.

Speaking on heading to town. For a small fee you can Fast Travel like a demon in this game. And you're even rewarded for finding the Waypoints. If there's somewhere you want to go, you just go there. No travel time.

It's new. And by that I mean that everyone is still figuring it out to some degree and there aren't many elitists yet. As someone who plays a lot of WoW, I find that extremely refreshing. Sure, the game's got a billion bugs, but if someone pops into the area chat and says "Good grief, why can't I find X" or "This game seems hard, can I get some pointers?" people actually help them instead of just calling them a noob and telling them to go to a website. With the exception of last Friday night when a very strange (and uninformed) political debate broke out in the zone I was questing, the chat has stayed 100% relevant to the game and is almost always positive.

No subscription fee! Just buy it already! I'm on the Dragonbrand realm.

P.S. I should probably mention things I dislike too. I didn't really think of that. If I have to pick something I do not like, I would say it's that you don't get your first 5-man dungeon experience until level 30 and it's fairly difficult. Dungeons are my favorite thing about WoW, so having to wait so long for each class stinks.

P.P.S. There's 10 professions (or classes) but only 5 character slots. What's up with that?

AOEO F2P!?

It happened: I've found a free to play game that I not only enjoy, but am constantly tempted to throw money at. This game is Age of Empires Online and I'm totally into it right now.

I played the original Age of Empires a ton as a kid. I wasn't very good at it, to be sure, but I liked the historical theme and the music. And I really liked hunting down and harvesting meat from elephants. Seriously, by the end of any game the elephants would be long gone. I think I even almost convinced my parents it was educational.

Fast forward to 2011, when Age of Empires Online first came out. It was free to try with two civilizations with many locked features and $20 for a license of the game, which included a premium civilization with those before-mentioned features unlocked. I heard it was pretty fun from a podcast but I didn't really get into it.

The gameplay is a mix between an RTS and an MMO. You have a capital city that is your central quest hub including inventory buildings, stores, crafting, and even dailies. After you accept a quest, you carry it out by going into an RTS game and playing as you would a normal Age of Empires game. But instead of just going from one game map to the next like the older games, you go back to your capital city for rewards and exp and such, and then choose what you want yo do next. Lots of these missions can also be done co-op with your friends! You also end up making alliances with other cities (you can travel to these for more quests/dailies) and there are neutral areas like Sparta (this is where you queue up for a game against another player) and another one who's name I can't remember which is where you can do skirmishes against the computer (also possible with a friend).

Now, it's truly Free to Play with a premium currency (Empire Points) that you can buy (charged through Steam) or earn very slowly in game to unlock things. More importantly, it's also on Steam now, which means awesome deals from time to time. That's what got me back into it. There is currently a 1st anniversary deal that includes a premium race (the Celts), the PvE skirmish "booster" (booster is their word for non-civilization specific content), expanded inventory space, and some other cosmetic stuff for only $10. Anyway, it was a good deal, and playing as a non-premium race isn't actually that fun because you can't equip any of the particularly good items. (Note, you can also get a Greek premium race on Amazon for like $4 right now.)

All told, it's a really fun new way to play an RTS and I'm having a great time with it. I really like the "level up" approach and the more social feeling of the game. There's also a new, cartoony, art style that is kind of fun (but not amazing...except for some of the animals, they have awesome animations) but will probably help it to not look so dated in coming years. Let me know if you play and we can do some co-op.

P.S. If they made a Starcraft game like this, I'm pretty sure it would be the last and only game I ever played.

Thank Goodness

It's finally over.

Few things excite and scare me as much as the Summer and Winter Steam Sales. It was a relief to power up my laptop this morning and see that the old gray format was back. I made a solemn oath to my wife Aubrey that I might go a little crazy during the sale but that I wouldn't buy any more games until Christmas (WoW Pandas excepted). Also, I would plan a fancy date. She thought this was a pretty good deal.

To preface, some of these are premium purchases for free to play or other games that try to nickle and dime you. I figured if I was going to try them out, I might as well do it while I can get some cheap bonuses.

So, I present to you the list of games that I got this past week:

Portal 2 - $11.50 for two copies plus a copy of the original Portal. Gotta do that co-op!

Binding of Isaac: Wrath of the Lamb expansion - $0.75. I've already talked about how I like BoI. Expansion for less thank a buck? Yes, please!

Dragon Age 2 - $6. Six dollars. Seriously. I've been dancing around getting this game for a really long time but was kind of waiting around for the right deal. DONE. Also, this was through Impulse since EA pulled it from Steam. That's right, EA, I still bought this from a third party.

Stacking - $3.75. This is a game about Russian nesting dolls that was featured in Game Developer Magazine before it game out. Never really wanted to drop $15 for something I'd never heard of outside a magazine...and I didn't have to!

Trine 2 - $3.75. I've written about Trine as well. This is one of the games I had my eye on specifically for this sale. Looks even better than the first and still a lot of fun. Haven't had a chance to try out the co-op yet.

Dungeon Defenders - $3.75. I've seen a lot of hype for this game so I figured I ought to pick it up while it was cheap. I might should have done for the complete set. But whatever. Let me know if you want to play!

Age of Empires Online - $3.50 for bonus swags. I played a ton of the first AoE back in the day. Seems like a cool direction of an RTS.

Tribes: Ascend - $10. I missed the flash sale where this was only $5, but it was still totally worth it. This is a fun shooter. I shouldn't have waited so long to try it out.

Lord of the Rings Online - $25 for two promotional deals, one of Steam and one on Impulse. Okay, sue me this doesn't sound very cheap. A friend of mine is really into this game and while it is free to play, they really, really try to get money out of you in game. Anyway, he assured me these were good deals when I asked, so I figured what the heck? An MMO for $25 and no subscription isn't bad at all.

Fallout New Vegas w/ all the DLC - $10. I haven't played any of the games in this series, so this seemed like it was a great place to start.

Torchlight - $3.75. Lots of people were talking about this one while they were waiting for Diablo 3 to come out. Now that I've already been kind of tired of D3 for a while now, I thought I might try out a different take.

Bioshock & Bioshock 2 - $10. I probably could have skipped this one, but it's one of those games that I never really got around to that people talk about a lot. I'm so glad I got it though! I got a little way into the first Bioshock and it's creepy and awesome! Worth it.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell "Elite Echelon Edition" (What a name!) - $12.50. This consists of four Splinter Cell games: the original, Chaos Theory, Double Agent, and Conviction. I was pretty into the first two when they came out, so this seemed like a great way to get back into the series. Plus I'm pretty sure Aubrey will like them because you spend so much time sneaking up on and ganking people.

Last, but not least, Plants Vs. Zombies - $2.50. We got this for my Mother-in-Law. She freaking loves it. 

So there you have it, 19 games and one expansion for $106.75. Yeesh, that's more than I thought I had spent. Still, they were awesome deals and that really should last me for quite some time. The worst part is I had just decided to stick with one race in Starcraft 2 and get out of Silver league. So much for that. I've got a date to plan.

What you get?

P.S. Impulse is still doing a big sale on RPGs including Mass Effect 3 until the beginning of August. Might want to check that out.

P.P.S. The normal cost for all those games would be $346.

Delays

Hey all. Sorry to keep you in anticipation. I've been experimenting a bit with screen capturing and streaming and whatnot to change things up a bit. It's going okay, but slowly. Jamestown is more or less scrapped for now as I needed to do another take but I didn't actually enjoy the game the first time so I had no desire to do it over again.

However, I'm trying to get things set up so I can record myself playing with commentary (and hopefully do it for free). I just got some old Might & Magic games on gog.com that I'm pretty excited to play for the blog, so I shouldn't be much longer. Feel free to post in the comments if you have any ideas/experience in this kind of thing.

LawLS. Or LoL. Or League of Legends.

As the big mess about DOTA 2 and Blizzard Dota goes on, my only memories of playing the original DOTA in Warcraft 3 was playing a few times against bots and being told that if I played online people would be super rude and probably kick me out of the game. That wasn't very encouraging. So while I wait for the new versions to come out, I decided to check out League of Legends. It's free, so there's nothing to lose.

If you're unfamiliar with the gameplay, it's a hero-based RTS wherein your team of heroes (or champions) tries to kill the opposing team's buildings while they try to do the same to you. If you understood the jargon there, it's really not any more complicated than that. The "free"-ness only extends so far, however, as they obviously want to get some money out of you. But you can play almost comfortably with just the free currency you earn by playing and winning matches. Otherwise, you can buy points to get more playable characters, runes, etc.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good time with it. There's some good tutorials in place and you can play against bots (for points) to practice up and try out new champions before going against real people. I've heard some horror stories about the community, but so far I've not had any problems at all (except for people with "Penis" in their nickname. What's up with that?). There's also a refer a friend program too, so if you want to try it out you should click on the link on my sidebar to join up! My nickname is MikeyH, friend me!

So yeah, I'm still not sure if I'll be picking sides with the whole Blizzard Dota/DOTA2 debate. Blizzard Dota will be free, so that's awesome, but it'll probably have less support and added features later on as well. DOTA 2 will be out sooner with more support and will probably be taken much more seriously in the esports community overall, but I hate how they stole a lot their character models right from Warcraft 3. That's kind of cheap. Either way, I'm sure they'll both be lots of fun. Here are some videos for them too:

I may have already posted this trailer here, but I love it so.

I wasn't able to find a trailer that had real gameplay in it, so here's a short gameplay clip of DOTA 2.

Anticipation: 2012

Okay, it looks like every website on the internet, including CNN, has a list of most-anticipated games for the coming year. Granted, CNN's kind of sucks, but I've decided to make one myself.

So, I present to you, in no particular order, Games Mike Wants to Play Next Year:

• Diablo III. This is the first game I've actually preordered. I'm super excited for this one.
• Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm. I love me some SC2. Granted, I'm skeptical that it'll come out in 2012, but I'm betting it'll be out by Christmas.
• World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. Yes, I'm excited for the Pandas. And the Pokemon thing. Cata has been kind of a flop, but that hasn't stopped me from having a good time. I'm hoping that the renewed focus on endgame content will perk things back up.

Hmm...those are definitely the big ones. What else is coming out in 2012? Again, I don't have any consoles, so my list will be somewhat restricted.

• Mass Effect 3. I do need a FPS fix every now and then. I admit I still need to finish ME2, but . Mass Effect 3 comes out in March, right in the middle of the semester, so I'll have time for ME2 before the Steam sale in July.
• DOTA 2/Blizzard Dota. I never really got into the first Dota because of the rumors about the community (i.e. everyone was rude and terrible). But I'm excited to give it another try. My take on the relationship between the two will have to wait for another post. 

• Whatever awesome indie games are coming out in the next year! Which of course leads me to...

• More Humble Bundles!

Bonus!

Games that came out this year that I want to get/finish.

• Batman: Arkham City (Steam sale in July).
• Trine 2 (hopefully this gets into a Humble Bundle).
• Bastion.
• Skyrim - I'm about 60 hours in, but there's still so much left!
• Mass Effect 2.

All in all, it looks like it'll be a great year gaming-wise. Here's hoping it's a great year all around!

I'll end this post with the opening cinematic for Diablo III. I dare you to watch it and not get excited.

Heroes 6: Part 2

My last post focused on my history with the Heroes of Might and Magic series and a short review of the newest iteration: "Might and Magic ® Heroes ® VI". That's right, two trademark icons.

Exciting

Anyway, after playing for a couple hours, I went to the internet to get some info about Ubisoft's UPoint system and found that when playing online, most games have a time limit of two-minutes per turn. This seemed like an awfully short amount a time, given the length of fights and city management and such. I then learned that most people use the "Quick Combat" feature (hereafter known as "QC"). This means that when you have to fight someone, instead of going into a battle scene the game just thinks for a second and gives you the results (i.e. who won, and how many guys were lost on each side) and the option to replay the encounter manually.

Less exciting

I was intrigued to learn this because I have conflicting feelings on the matter. This has always been a feature in this series, but this is the first time that I've ever been tempted to use it myself. I find myself tempted because it saves a ton of time and, in most cases, the computer gets better results than I would. However,I've thought about it and I think that using QC/not using QC effectively splits HoMM 6 into different two games. One of them is an exploring/strategy game with pictures of creatures that "fight" for you so you can accomplish a given task. The other is an exploring/strategy game wherein you gather armies with unique strengths and weaknesses and lead them into battle, making sure to use each in the most efficient way possible in order to accomplish a given task. Which one sounds more exciting to you?

Neat

That said, ever since I figured out QC was viable I've only fought two battles manually, and I lost one of them. Using QC is great in part because it really does save a ton of time so you can win the war instead of pouring yourself into each and every battle and taking hours to complete one map. On the other hand, the less time you spend on the ground in combat, the less you feel for your troops, which lowers your enjoyment of the game overall. I found this particularly true when using a faction I was unfamiliar with. If I don't see each unit in combat, not only do I not really know whether they are melee/ranged/casters, but I never actually see them in action. That makes me unable to appreciate their power or feel as proud of my own accomplishment in earning them. They really do just become little pictures with a number on them.

Awesome

One could argue that, even when taking part in combat, the units are just little models that wave their arms around. They are no more alive than a static picture. Despite that, the models certainly feel more real. Watching them go forth and beat the crap out of bad guys is much more engaging and emotional than just watching the numbers go up and down. Beyond that, there is an incredible amount of suspense and thrill that comes of out of a close match that simply doesn't occur on the QC aftermath panel.

In the end, it's a trade-off. Both are good choices in my opinion. My plan from here is to only use QC when I'm already familiar with the units/fights and do it manually when I've got new guys to try out or it's a special fight. And, as mentioned, there's always the choice to go back and do each fight yourself should you choose. Game on!

P.S. I bet Ubisoft's online forums have a huge discussion on this issue, but their forums are down for "maintenance" and have been for the past week.

Getting Back to My Roots

Once upon a magical time, in the fourth

Incredible bad guy-killing text!

grade, my friend Josh told me about this new game he'd got. It was called "Heroes." It had heroes in it! And...creatures...and you killed bad guys and took their castles and were able to make MORE creatures! He was really excited about it but I wasn't sold. He went on to say it was like Civilization 2 except with monsters and stuff. "Civ 2 with monsters" didn't sound very cool to me. However, it turns out the game, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, was freaking AWESOME. We played that game a lot. A whole lot. My favorite sides were the Warlocks (dragons = the best), but I liked most of them equally (except the humans, they were kind of meh). We even tried to play it online (back when you only needed one copy of the game in order to play each other of the modem), but it turns out two fourth graders 20 miles apart with only one phone line each were not very good can getting connection to work. (At one point, I called him to ask what was going on. It never rang, but just sounded blank like someone had picked up. I started talking, but he never responded. Turns out he could hear me over the computer speakers and kept trying to yell back to me through them.)

Oh city screen, I'll always miss you.

Once Heroes 3 came out and was even better, I was hooked. It's too bad they didn't really put counters on time played on games back then, I would love to know just how long I spent in sixth grade and beyond play it. I already know it's an unhealthy amount, but we'll never know just how unhealthy. Except then Heroes 4 was lame. And 5 had such annoying battle cameras and cut-scenes that I only put about an hour into it before calling it quits.

A few months ago, I starting seeing advertisements on Steam for "Might and Magic ® Heroes ® VI". That's right--two registered trademark symbols. (Sidenote: of the 65 games I have on Steam, this is the only game with those in the title. And there's two of them. In other news: Holy crap I have 65 games on Steam.) And why did they change the title? That made me a little nervous. However, I know better than to judge a book by its cover. Once it released, it got good but definitely not great reviews. I'd been burned in the past, so I decided I'd wait for it to go on sale and try it later.

Much less cartoony, that's for sure. 

That day came on December 31st. It was a perfect storm of contributing factors. It was 50% off on Steam for one day only. I had just won Chore Wars (more on that in another post) for the month of December. And then Aubrey's computer died, meaning in part that if we were going to play a game together, it would have to be on the same computer at the same time. (Hint: As the Heroes games are turn-based, you can play them in "Hotseat" mode, meaning more than one person can play in the same game on the same computer, you just switch out.) So I went ahead and pulled the trigger.

The Good so far:
Good graphics on the adventure map.
The creatures all appear to be very unique.
Solid Heroes of Might and Magic gameplay.
New mechanics on how to guard mines/other buildings on the adventure map.
The introduction of Dynasty Heroes and Weapons.
Using achievement points to buy items (I was worried about this at first, but they give you a ton of points).
The soundtrack.

The Less Good:
Runs pretty clunky. If I can run Skyrim on my laptop, Heroes 6 has no excuse.
Removal of the City Screen. What? Where did it go?
Objects are somewhat harder to identify on the adventure map. It all kind of runs together at first.
Other small interface changes.
The terrible-sauce DRM.

More on the Dynasty stuff and the DRM. Dynasty Heroes and Dynasty Weapons persist from map to map. So if you level up a hero in one custom game, they stay leveled for your next match. Dynasty Weapons are weapons you equip to your heroes that can also level up and persist beyond a single match. There's about 25 of them that you can find through the campaign and other sources. I'm totally digging both of these additions.

Ok, now, which things can I pick up and where can/can't I walk?

The DRM, on the other hand, is terrible. As I bought the game through Steam, I'm already about as DRM'd as I can be. However, Ubisoft decided that each player also needed to have a personal login for the game itself. All of your game progress is stored on Ubisoft servers. This is kind of cool, but if you don't have an internet connection or (much more likely) the service just goes down, you have no access to your saved games or Dynasty heroes/weapons and cannot unlock achievements. Sigh.

Either way, I'd definitely recommend picking it up. It's not Heroes 3, but it is very good. I think the only real reason not to get it would be if you're a stickler about DRM, as most of my other complaints were either personal preference or things that I just need to get used to. I've even got Aubrey hooked on it after only one game. Thank goodness for Hotseat mode.

Pick up Heroes 2 or Heroes 3 on Good Old Games! (Link to GoG front page here)
Heroes 6 on Steam or Amazon or, you know, whatever.

Back into Skyrim

Remember when Skyrim was released and everyone that bought it for PC went "Huh...well this interface is terrible."? Then people realized if they plugged in an XBox controller it would work like a dream. But then the "purists" said that they shouldn't have to use a controller. I recall reading one forum poster say "If you're not using a mouse and keyboard for a first-person game on a PC, you're doing it wrong." Well ladies and gentleman, I'm proud to announce that as of Christmas, I'm now doing it wrong. It was simple, seamless, and awesome.

My ladyfriend bought me a wired XBox Controller for Christmas and suddenly Skyrim (and a lot of other Steam games) are much easier to play. All the little icons changed automatically from keyboard keys to game pad buttons. As wonderful as Skyrim is, you really had to be committed to play it with the mouse and keyboard.  I'm right with you in saying that Bethesda should have made a more PC-appropriate interface, but they didn't. So now I will just do it wrong until the modders take care of it. It just feels right.

There's been a lot of awesome Skyrim music covers. I'll wrap up this post with my current favorite.

Yup, I lied. I couldn't help but include this video too. I want to shake the hand of the guy who did this. Make sure to stay at least for the second scene.

LMFAO Skyrim Dance Party - Watch more Game Trailers