Aurora Feint 3 is a free to play online game for iPad, made by “Aurora Feint, Inc.”, and is often called an MMO, but actually it’s more like a “social puzzle game with RPG features”, I'd say. RPG features are that you have a character that gains levels and experience, social part is that you can call upon your Facebook friends (if any play this game) to aid you in battle and also every player’s score goes to leaderboards. The rest of the game is a puzzle. But, considering it’s an iPad game, and it has something to do with social games and RPGs, what an interesting puzzle and a splendid game it is! I sat until 5 A.M. yesterday, unable to stop playing it, so here goes my experience with this game.

You aren’t charged to download the game, and it downloads quite fast, so i assume it has a comparable small client size. Then you have to create an account in OpenFeint (a global network between different games by “Aurora Feint, Inc.”, used for leaderboards, achievements and forum access). The downside here is that you need an internet connection every time you run this game, because it need to login to OpenFeint to let you play, so you can play only in civilized surroundings, so no going to a summer cabin with Aurora Feint 3 in your bag.

The graphics of this game are very good - the hand-drawn 2D backgrounds and characters are very moody, and look very nice overall. The music is very moody too, reminding you of the dark forest you play in, and the sound of special effects you hear all the time is not annoying at all, which i appreciated very much. When you enter the game, you are presented with a Tetris-like shape that is getting filled with different types of bricks (they are not “bricks” of course, i’m just not sure what word to use to describe them, well, just take a look at the screenshots), and that is all what this game has in common with Tetris.

You are not just a player, when you just have started, there is a small bit of a story shown to you by a forest fairy (who presents you with a tutorial at first) – you found yourself beaten in the forest and must recuperate fast, because there are many bad fellows who want to beat you again. Not the best story in the world, but for a puzzle game to have any story at all is a plus. So, here comes the RPG part: you have levels, experience points, character stats, health bar and a number of lives. Each time you eliminate a line of bricks you restore some health points.


When your health bar is full there comes the combat mode: some thief or other mean character comes to beat you up again. The aggressor has health points too, and you need to defeat him before your own health runs down to zero – you do that by eliminating the bricks too, more bricks you remove = more damage the aggressor takes. You can be defeated by a specially nasty foe, and here what the lives are for: when you are defeated, you can either surrender or use one of your lives to continue the fight.

These lives you can buy for real life money (this is where the micro transactions of this game are hidden) and they let you play faster, because there *are* foes you can’t defeat without them. If you lose a fight, nothing really bad happens, you just start again with your health low, then you are presented with one or two not so mean foes you can easily defeat, and after that the same foe that kicked your ass comes back. I tried to play without paying to see if it’s possible and was beaten twice (so far) by the first Mercenary i met, but as i fight other (lesser) foes, i gain up levels and plan to get my revenge on that mean guy in the end.

When you defeat a foe you are given some experience points, and when the experience gauge is full you gain a level. There’s no points to distribute anywhere, so you just automatically given new stats boosts every time you level up – like, more health or something else. The other stats like luck have something to do with the game mechanics, but it’s hard to notice until you are at least a few levels high. Also, when you're in a fight, there appears a button “Call to Arms”. By pressing it, you can login to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, and if there are any friends who play this game too, you can call upon them to aid you in the fight. I couldn’t check this out, because none of my Facebook friends play this game yet, so i can’t tell you what exactly happens – but i assume, somehow they help you to deal more damage.

Now, i already said you can gain health and deal damage to your foes by eliminating the bricks. This is the funniest and most interesting part of this game! The bricks move into the screen in a Tetris-like fashion, and you have to move then horizontally to create lines of 3-5 bricks to eliminate them (they’re gone at 3 in line, but you can connect up to 5 bricks). The more bricks you eliminate at a time, the more health or damage points you generate. You can start chains by eliminating several types of bricks one after another to gain even more points, but it’s a tricky business and i am myself not yet any good at that :)

Of course, you move the bricks with your fingertip, which is fun in itself. But what’s more fun, if you turn your iPad, the game will recognize that and the gravity inside of it will change too, so “right” becomes “down” (or vice versa) and you can move the bricks in another direction. In health restoring more you don’t need to hurry, but in a fight you’re forced to do that quite fast if you want to win. I had to take short brakes after a long time playing, because my hands grew tired of the business, but it was a very engaging activity.

So, my verdict is – this is a very nice, good looking and interesting game i would recommend to anyone with a taste to puzzle games. Additional bonus is that Aurora Feint 3 is a new game so it gets upgrades and bug fixes quite often. If you have an iPad, you sure need to give a try.

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Yesterday I've got an iPad. I am no Mac fan myself and this is the first spawn of GodJobs ever to cross the borders of my home safely – we had no iPhones and iPods here ever before. But a few days ago of my family members was overseas and my husband asked him to bring us an iPad. Since, you know, we in Russia still can’t buy iPads in any store – you’d have to book for it, then wait a few months, then pay at least twice much as it costs in USA or Europe. Heck, I’d probably have to wait a month just to get a travel case for this iPad, which would cost me around $80, can you believe that? Not a good thing to live in Russia sometimes, i tell you! But i’m getting on the wrong topic here, let’s get back to my iPad – messing with it, i suddenly realized there are MMO games too and i never even thought of MMO gaming on a keyboard-less device! So let’s take a look at the first few free MMO games for iPad I’ve found so far.

I haven’t played them extensively, you see – so here goes the description from Apple Store and a few screenshots. I am going to write a reviews for these games, so consider this article a little teaser.

Pocket Legends

It’s “a ground-breaking and unique Mobile MMORPG, or where you can join thousands of players from around the world. Play with your friends and make new friends online. Cooperate to undertake wild adventures in endless dungeon campaigns”.
Well, what it good about this game, first - it’s full 3D, second – it’s iPad native and third - it has a convenient WoW-like interface tuned for playing with no keyboard or mouse. I couldn’t play it for long, though, because the servers went down for a maintenance yesterday.

CastleCraft

“In this massively-multiplayer, city-building strategy game, you will follow three different quest lines, form alliances and wage war using careful combinations of military, resource and technology units. Play against friends and others, chat in real time, and watch your gorgeous city expand under intricate day-night cycles with dynamic particle effects and lush graphics.”
This is an iPod application by the looks of it, but can run on iPad too. The idea looks interesting, and the graphics – while using 2D sprites – still looks very nice, but player reviews in the store itself (about the game being extremely bugged & no support available) makes me a bit nervous.
Upgrade: read Castle Craft review here.

 

Aurora Feint 3

“Join the world of Aurora Feint, the award winning series of match-3 puzzle games everyone loves on iPhone finally returns for iPad! Gather your friends and enter the ever expanding massively-multiplayer RPG world of fantasy, mystery, and magic.“
Another native iPad application with a nice graphics, but looks more like puzzle than MMO to me. Still, I’d like to see how they connected MMO and puzzle genres with leaderboards and achievements, and what is coming out of it.
Upgrade: read Aurora Feint 3 Review here.

There are other games on iPad, i believe, but these few had caught my eye first, so wait ‘till i play and write a reviews on them first, before i move to other games!

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One more header post here. When i created this blog, i wanted to write not only about games and post stuff like video trailers and reviews - like the majority of gaming bloggers usually do - but i wanted to talk about online games inner working. Why some games are better than other? What these "other" do lack in comparison with the "better" one? How they make people sit and play, and play, and play day and night, until they drop out of their work or college, or worse? Why so many people pay for online games – and many of them pay hundreds of dollars or even more. Of course, it happens not just by itself, but as planned by people who make games. And my education in advertisement allows me to see through many of these tricks – this is what i am going to write about.

This post will be upgraded with the links when i write new articles.

Women Gamers of Russia: Who Are They? “Perfect World” Audience Study

A short thought on mmos market state by eyes of a gamer
Online Games and Cash Shops: Why People Pay
Online Games Addiction: The Crude Reality
Lord of the Rings Online: How F2P Coexists With P2P

Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 1
Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 2
Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 3
Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 4

Why People Play Bad Games?

Role-Playing In MMO Worlds - Why Some Games Have More Opportunities For A Role-Player Than Others?
Role-Playing in MMO Worlds – What Is It, Why It May Be Interesting for You and How To Start Role-play

Healthy Player-Base Ecology Or Why MMO Worlds Get Deserted If there Are No Role-Players Around
Minions Of Mirth - Forging a Dream: How a Two Person Team Has Created the Best Indie MMORPG Out There
From Community Driven to Community Created Games – Based on Grandroids and Ryzom stories

RIFT Planes of Telara Lore for Dummies

Internet Trolls And How to Deal with Them (Antitrolling)

How a Stone Age Brain, Decision-Making and Game Sales are all tied in one or Why I'm buying unneeded stuff?

Consumers vs. Assholes – Part 1: Penny Arcade, Ocean Marketing and Russian Mafia

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Regnum Online is a free to play Realm-vs.-Realm fantasy MMORPG by NGD Studios, released back in 2007. It’s not a well-known game or very popular, but rather undeservedly underestimated, because Regnum Online is a real “hidden pearl” out there and one of the best F2P RvR games out there on the market. So, why you might want to try it out? There are several reasons i’m going to tell you about.

NGD Studios is an Argentinean-based company that started off with just a few friends who enjoyed making games for themselves and grown up into a company with 30+ employees. They were the first people who started making games in Argentina, so i guess they learned a thing or two since then. What i liked about Regnum Online even before downloading its client, is that its developers seem to really care about their project and the community.

Being released in 2007 makes a game’s graphics outdated by now, but NGD Studios is working on that, replacing old models, textures and parts of game mechanics with a new ones, made with the current graphic and game design standards in mind. How many games can you name having a face-lift like that? Eve Online comes to mind, and that’s all i can remember for now. Also, Regnum Online’s developers are known to fix things the community had pointed onto, and not long ago they implemented a new ticket system for their support team, replacing the old “send us an email” one, which in my opinion clearly shows their care.

The next thing that caught my attention was graphics. As i said before its being upgraded, and the client had grown significantly because of that – if you see a client around 400-600 megs on some old file sharing service - it’s outdated. The new client looks… gorgeous. Actually, the game looks like an A-class P2P project, well, maybe a little bit worse, but still not even close enough to all those 1GB anime-style F2P games out there. It’s well animated, and the models looks very nice, and the overall design of this game makes you go and screenshot it here and there, all the time. The graphics of this game somewhat alike to World of Warcraft style – somewhat cartoonish, somewhat realistic.

Also, Regnum Online has a very high replay ability, because there are 3 realms, and you choose only 1 once and for all for that account - I mean, you really have to create a new account if you want to play for another realm. And the realms are all different, for example, Alsius is all covered with snow, icebergs, pines and snow bears, Ignis is a harsh, scorching hot desert land and Syrtis is a lush green,flower field and elves-infested land. All realms also have different quests.

Oh, this game has a lot of quests for PvE oriented players out there. Of course, they include some usual grinding like “go and kill me these bears” and so like, but there are some original stuff also. The downside of Regnum Online is that it doesn’t have a quest tracking system (at least, at the time when i write this review – i don't know, maybe they’ll implement it someday), means, you don’t have a bright spot on your map showing where to go. It was just fine for me, but might be somewhat hardcore for other players spoiled with quest tips. Usually, it’s not hard to find anything mentioned in the quest if you read the description carefully. But, as a girl, i have some topographic cretinism plaguing me even in online games, so i often forgot which way is east or west, lol :) I’m sure you’ll be just fine. What i am saying, you don’t need to grind to level up until at least lvl30 (there are still quests above that, but fever), you can just do quests or use a cash shop.

The cash shop… I liked that too, actually. NGD Games went the other way and did not put on sale anything that would unbalance the game, like armor pieces or stat boosters. Nope, they earn money the other way – you can buy a mount (and it’s permanent) or cosmetic items, or an experience booster. Also, if you want to skip leveling up and get right to RvR, you can buy a special item that will automatically level you to 30+, where you can start fighting for your Realms right away. Also, what brings cash in, is that healing and other potions are sold for cash – they are cheap but in constant use the same time. Plus, if you want to duel someone, you have to buy a dueling banner, which is also part of PVP. But, actually, you can play for free for a very long time if you’re in just for doing quests and RvR fights, it just would be harder for you, but still possible.

About PvP action now… If you came for PvP, this is not the game for you. Regnum Online is all about RvR, and RvR in Regnum Online is all about teamwork. It’s very interesting to play and on my look are way better than RvR in many other games. The only downside, if you’re a fighting class, you need to level up to lvl30 before you can successfully join RvR - if you are a healer, you can join at lvl21. Well, actually, everyone can join fights at lvl21, it’s just a matter of you getting killed often enough. When you “die” you are rather defeated than killed, you don’t lose items, but get a penalty not letting you earn new experience until you kill enough mobs to “lighten you up” after your failure.

The combat system, however, is kind of unusual and may be hard to get used to for some players. Unlike other games, you can’t just click an enemy and run to hit it, you have to active the combat mode by pressing space. Then your character draws his/her weapon out and takes a fighting stance, you walk manually to your foe and start hitting it. The good news are, if you’re not in a combat mode, most of the mobs won’t ever notice you until you draw your weapon out, so you can just run minding your own business and not being chased by a hundred of bloodthirsty mobs at the same time.

This review is getting a bit long, but i must also mention Regnum Online interface and sound. First, the interface – it’s some kind of a mixture between Lineage2-like interface and the one that is used in western games. It has some annoying downsides like window arrangement, but i can’t say it’s bad overall, just needs getting used to as the combat system does. The sound is, well, hard to decide if it’s bad or good. The music is fine and not very annoying when you listen to it for a long time, i even enjoyed it, but the sound effects are few and repetitive. For example, the wind blowing – it has only one sound, and a really short one, that repeats over and over, so i had to tune FX down. There are several bugs in Regnum Online, but as they get fixed constantly, i won’t go into the details – just rest assured, there’s nothing really bad that may prevent you from playing.

The last this i want to say about Regnum Online, is that it may be a bit hardcore for players that had not much gaming experience before this game. Absence of the quest tracker, the combat mode and overall game difficulty may turn some players away at first. When i just started, i whined at the interface at first, but the developers had conveniently put a Help section right in the main menu (press Esc), so it went just fine, but then i went on killing my first mob and it almost killed me instead! There were few awkward moments also, like when I’ve got into a Valhalla zone (Alsius realm) and clicked a bright shiny stuff, which happened to be a portal to a zone with mobs who only had to sneeze at my newbie character to kill it…

But, i took my time and afterwards i liked Regnum Online pretty much. I play it myself from time to time, it’s even one of the games i have installed in my parent’s place, in case if i get bored while visiting them. So if you need an interesting and both good-looking game, you may want to give Regnum Online a try.

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Another header post here, and this is a positive one! There are other posts where i tell about games that aren’t exactly worth to play (in my opinion), but this one is all about good games that aren’t very famous or well-known. There are such MMO projects that really have something about them, be it an interesting gameplay mechanics or an unique style or even a great community support – but not many people know about them. Here I am going to list my reviews on these games, and the post will be upgraded each time i find a new game like that.

Current reviews are:

8-Bit MMOS – A Nostalgic Gig You Can't Miss Out

Regnum Online Review

Hidden Pearls: Caesary Review

GodVille – Massively-multiplayer Zero-player Game (Doubt It You Even Knew This Concept Could Exist at all!)

Should I Play Vanguard In 2011?” Yes, And Here’s Why: Vanguard Myths Debunked – Myth №1: No One Plays Vanguard
“Should I Play Vanguard In 2011?” Yes, And Here’s Why: Vanguard Myths Debunked – Myth №2: Vanguard is not upgraded and there is no new content

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As i am writing this, the top two “most popular” posts in this blog are, respectively, “New Facebook game “Zen garden” – a new star or a new fail?” and “MMORPG Gold Selling - Not all that glitters is gold”. The first one is a negative review of a Facebook game, i.e. i’m telling everyone the truth – that this game is no good and why; and the second one is about gold selling market, why it’s no good either. Both these articles were rejected by EzineArticles (one of the major article directories). The reason i was given is that they do not want any negative review. It means, i can’t tell that Zen Garden is a bad game – they don’t want you to know if some thing is really bad, but everyone must pretend it’s a superb thing, or be silent! But don’t we deserve to know the truth before we pay? Good thing no one moderates this blog – oooohh, i am so going to write negative reviews about every crappy game out there that poses for a good one to get a hold on your money!

Actually, I can see why they don’t want anyone to write negative review – in case of this particular game, what if i tell everyone it’s bad and then its developers would look at EzineArticles and say, “holy cow, we won’t pay these guys for ads, they allowed someone to bark at our game!”. This also why you would look up and down many major gaming networks and never find an honest review about a game that is really bad and isn’t worth your time – there are few sites that allow themselves to write the truth and not being afraid of losing some future advertiser.

There is no one to tell me in my own blog what i can or can’t write about, and i have no ads. Well, to be honest, if this blog ever gets popular, it would deserve buying an own domain and  a hosting space for it, and then I'd have to put up some ads to cover the hosting plan. But if that ever gets real, I'll never stop writing truth just because, say, some gaming company won’t like to sell me their ads. And i also don’t care what EzineArticles staff would think of this post, either.

Btw, about the second article (the one about gold selling) they told me it contains phrases like “wow gold” and promotes gold selling by containing a name of the major gold seller. I wrote gold selling company’s name in a connection to a child abuse scandal where its owner was a main star – and they say i am promoting gold selling! What kind of promotion is that? And what a sorry bunch of losers!

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I finally got to see it (the trailer was released by MMOHut over YouTube a day before yesterday). I must say, after watching this trailer i felt a bit like someone had shot my brain out or i just have seen some sort of a mind-killing anime. Thanks god i’m a not a guy, or i would have felt like a pedophile instead.

 

Lucent Heart is a “fantasy dating mmorpg” and, obviously, highly inspired by manga/anime. I assume, “dating features” of this game is targeted at eastern audience (as it’s already quite popular in Asia), but what would come out of releasing it for western world, that is a mystery to me. Besides dating Lucent Heart provides standard mmo features like classes, quests, raids, etc. No beta date is provided yet, but the game is supposed to be released during the 2010 holiday season.

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This is an off-topic post again, but i simply can’t mention a console birthday *again*. PlayStation2 hits 10 years today! I have one standing on a TV’s cupboard right next to me as i write this – the oldest model, not the slim one. Actually, it has a long story and a bit of romantic stuff to remember with it. Isn’t it funny? Usually, when girls mention something romantic, they mean flowers, bunnies, chocolate candies or all of the above at once. I remember romantic things about PlayStation2… Well, what to say, i choose “Chick Geek” nickname after all!

Ten years ago i was a teenager and a gamer already (and for quite a long time, i must add), i had my own PC, but no “living” consoles (i had a Russian/Chinese NES clone called Dendy and a SEGA MegaDrive aka Genesis, but they were already gone), and there goes the PS2 release… In a few years many wonderful games got released on PS2, like a new installment to Final Fantasy series - I loved Final Fantasy 8 and ached to play parts 9 and 10 on PS2 so much that i had four posters of FF10 in my room (and that’s for FF10 alone!). I remember looking at Yuna and Rufus before going to sleep, every day… But i never got PS2.

Several years ago, when i was already an adult and a student, i met a guy from my city over Internet, and we became friends. One evening he came over and told me he “has a black box for me”, i did not understood him and didn’t paid much attention at first… but then he took a PlayStation2 out of his backpack! And he had a Final Fantasy 10 with him! He said, when he was a kid, he wanted PS2 too, and too never got it, but when he became older and started working part-time he could raise some money to buy used PS2 on a flea market. He lent the console and the game to me, and some other games too, and would come every day to play together. And I've spent my free-of-classes time to play FF10... My childhood dream had finally come true.

So, happy birthday to you, Play Station 2!

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MapleStory is a fantasy MMO by Wized Corporation/Nexon (released back in 2005) that is “free to play” i.e. cash shop based, with 2d graphics (yes! it's two-dimensional!), no PVP at all and one of the worst grinding games out there. I don’t know why people play 2d games at all, but if you want to check this game out – i warn you, read this review first. I’m not going to go into much details about skills, classes and stuff – i’m going to write an honest opinion of what this game is in general.

First off, this is game’s target audience are kids and young teenagers, but there are a lot of adults who play it, so the player base is mixed. And, well, MapleStory has some nice points in it, like a bright graphics (i don’t like 2d games at all, but the images alone look good for a 2d game) and ability to play for a long time without spending money, and it might be fun if you have real-life friends or family members playing with you – the game has a big social backup and can work just like a big shiny chat room for you and your friends with occasionally made raids to kill some mobs together. But, if you want to play, not just chat, be careful then.

This game is a grind feast, one of the worst in the whole market (i think only Lineage2 and maybe Silkroad Online are worse that MapleStory). There are quests, yes, but after the first impression of “yay, i play a new game, and it’s shiiiiny!” wears off, you’re faced against grind. There’s no way to reach high levels without losing your sanity or paying someone to play instead of you, or, i don’t know, putting a brick on your “attack” button while you go to sleep. Also, MapleStory is easy to hack.

And, taking into account both of these facts, surprise-surprise! there are so many people who cheat in this game, it’s hard to tell who actually doesn’t – there is no way you can reach lvl150+ without hacking the game. What are MapleStory GMs doing about that? I don’t know, maybe they’re drinking or smoking some pot… They don’t usually give a crap about people cheating, and even if they do once in a while, the cheaters just come back and that’s all. There are some events held by GMs periodically, but they are just the same, repeated all over and over. And about the support from GMs, if you run into a problem, drop any hopes about GMs helping you, it’s not going to happen.

What kind of community MapleStory has, along with such “helpful” and “caring” Game Masters? Oh, it’s even better! The community is the worst thing about this game, beside the grinding part. Most of the people you may see around treat each other like enemies, and if you have just started playing, you better lay low and don’t call any attention. People won’t help a newbie like they may in other games, if you asked for a direction they’ll probably pretend you don’t exist at all. Many people will certainly try to rip you off, scam you or at least try to make your MapleStory life miserable. Why? Oh, well, have you forgot i told you everyone are cheaters in this game – what would you expect from someone who hacks into an mmo game?

But i must admit things like that mostly happen in towns, when you’re out in the wild people would follow you and pick up whatever monster drops you had, leaving you with nothing to sell. There’s no PVP, remember, you can’t do anything about ninja-looters in this game! If you’re training on a map alone, and someone came by, chances are they’ll stay just to harass you – to kill your mobs before you do and get all the drop - magicians and thieves love to do that as they are fast DPS classes.

But that’s not the end of it – if you happen to come by someone else’s map and they don’t like it, expect even more harassment. You’ll probably get stalked, many people think annoying others is very fun. You may also get a reaction like “OMG YOU FUCKING NOOB THIS IS MY MAP” out of nowhere. Speaking about reactions, there are some people who pretend they are GMs when they are not, and others would swear at you, stating they’ll ask their friend/family GM to bad you (i assume, this is where MapleStory’s target audience shows – angry stupid kids).

There are decent people, of course, like in even game, but they are not nearly a majority in MapleStory, and if you don’t know anyone already, it may be really hard to find someone normal to play with (on a side note: don’t add strangers just to fill up your “family” slots, you may get into a lot of trouble with the wrong people).

Now, the cash shop. There are a lot of things Nexon forces you to pay for, during the events  or just as a part of game play (like, there’s a magic-based class that you can only buy for cash), and if you’re bad at controlling yourself with the money stuff, just don’t start buying anything, because it’s very easy to spent in this game. Stuff you buy isn’t permanent, and all the clothes and other nice stuff you’ve bought for cash will expire after some time, and you’ll have to pay again. Some people end up spending like $400 or more per month. There are ways to get cash shop money without paying for them, but these ways are few and may not work for every country. Oh, and MapleStory gold-selling market is one of the most noticeable i guess, because every time i type “MapleStory” into Google there are pages after pages with “buy MapleStory mesos” headers on them.

A few words about graphics and music overall. As i said above, for a 2d game graphics are pretty well done, but to actually look good you’d need to buy cosmetic stuff and, like i said, it will expire in time. Towns and character images are somewhat limited, so if you played for some time, the game starts to look dull and repetitive – platforms, benches, etc. are all the same, just arranged differently. Characters look nice, but to get what you want you’d need to pay for the cosmetics. The music is much more worse than the visuals are. I’m not sure, but it sounds like it’s made for really small kids – such a little innocent music that drives adults mad after some time. You might as well turn it off and put on your own playlist, than listen to MapleStory music.

Oh, and i forgot to mention MapleStory’s storyline! Well, that’s probably because there’s no story for MapleStory! Fun, isn’t? The name of this game alone suggests some plot going on, but no, they just took it off the ceiling. Pretty ironic, if you ask me. There are stories such as “Evan being dragon masters” and “Aran being a hero who fought the black mage”, but what about Adventurers, Cygnus? There’s nothing, no story going on – just the repetitive grinding for XP points and showing off “look, i’m cooler than you!” to the people who are lover on level than you. In the middle of 2010 it was reported to lag horrible on some servers, but i don’t know if this has been fixed now or still poses a problem.

So, overall – this game is full of cheaters and also full of grind to say the least, its community is a very bad and unhelpful one, there’s no storyline and practically nothing much to do besides training and grinding to get on the top players list. If you have friends who play MapleStory and you’re not afraid of grinding yourself, you might still try playing it - just keep away from the community.

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Most of the contemporary games work on micro transactions and have their own cash shop where you’re supposed to be spending more and more money. Studies show (according to PlaySpan and Frank N. Magid Associates) that said cash shops are going to generate around $17 billions by 2015, and American gamers alone have spent on micro transactions around $250 millions in 2009. Why people buy things that don’t even exist is another story, but why spent so much? Here are the basic reasons on why people part with their money.

1. When you don’t pay in cash, you don’t have an exact feeling of spending money. It’s not like when you take a piece of that precious paper (you worked so hard for it!) and give it to someone else. You just press a button, and your bank account log just shows you a new number. So not feeling like you’ve spent something, you are ready to spend more – and people do spent more using plastic cards or checks rather than cash, which also works for online games cash shops.

2. You don’t want to wait. There are all kinds of people, someone doesn’t have much time to spent on online gaming (which is really time-consuming these days), or aren’t interested in building up their character and want to skip the game play up to the end-game content or whatever is their goal. So they buy experience boosters to be done with the character development as fast as they can. Also, this covers buying things you could get for free if you’d have spent your time.

3. You want to be better than everyone else. Humans are social beings and our society’s standards assume we’re in a constant competition with everyone else – having a better job, getting into a successful marriage, getting a new shoes before that freak Jenn has got them first. Et cetera. But many people who, due to some reason, are unsuccessful in this competing life are having inferiority complex, which makes them compensate for it in some field they can be good at.
In gaming, and especially in online games with cash shops, these people buy a lot of stuff to “be awesome”, to be better than someone else. Many games exploit this reasoning by implementing more and more levels of awesomeness, so you have to buy more and more things to just stay cool.

4. The price doesn’t look so high. There’s this obvious, old and beardy trick when you’re paying not a $100, but $99.95, which is practically the same, but the second number looks smaller than the first.

5. The prices are really low, but it’s an item that you need constantly. Like healing potions or portal scrolls or other game-specific things. They don’t cost you much, but you need them all the time, so you do shop for them now and then, and spent a presumable amount of money not even noticing it.

6. Hidden recurring charges. Yes, the game might be “free to play”, but it may still has recurring charges that are not obvious to you. Many games offer additional inventory or bank space, or a mount (or anything else that you may need for a prolonged period of time) for additional charge. If you bought (for example) an additional inventory slots pack, you probably won’t want to get back to living without them – and keep paying. This is what i call a hidden recurring charge. And these charges alone can cost you more in this “free to play” game than if you’d pay a $15 for a subscription-based game. 

7. There’s a “limited time offer” – be it a limited discount time on something or a limited amount of items available for sale. It’s an old trick too, actually. Remember, when you watch a TV spot for these new kitchen knives, and a salesman says if you call and place an order right now there’s a 50 bucks discount plus a second set of knives as a special gift to first few callers? It makes my mom reach for the phone every time, no matter how many times I’ve told her it’s a scam!
So the cash shops work like that too: when you think the time is running short, you stop thinking and just jump at the offer. Actually, buying things with a discount seems to be a good strategy for you, but many people buy more than they need – just in case, because, who knows, a good stash is always good – and spend more than they would have without the discount offer.

So, here are the basic reasons why people pay and why you may want to pay for a game too – there’s nothing wrong with paying for someone’s work, just keep in mind, how much are you really ready to spent and if the thing is worth it.

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Legendary Champions is a “free to play” Chinese-style fantasy mmorpg by USERJOY Technology / Aeria Games. I had no time to check this game in its closed beta stage, but after reading some positive things about it i thought it is worth checking its open beta after all. Every LC ad out there states that it “stands out from the crowd by offering players unique 5v5 PvP gameplay reminiscent of the super-popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients or DotA. As players take part in these DotA style matches they can choose from a wide variety of heroes to transform into, heroes that span entirely different eras and time periods, such as Dracula or even King Arthur.” Don’t believe it. There’s nothing close to DotA there, and while i usually spent a lot more time on each game, this one made me want to uninstall it after a few hours at best.

Not that i did expected an A class game from Aeria after all… But, let’s start from the beginning. The game is based on Chinese culture and styling, but, unlike Kingdom Heroes (which happen to use the same setting) it looks like one of faction leaders wanted to spice up things a bit – the player character is an adopted child to one of the faction leaders and has an ability to impersonate one of the great Champions (they made Maid of Orleans to look Chinese, didn’t seen their Beowulf, but i’m actually glad about that). Male characters look a lot like females (and some even more feminine than said females themselves), which seems to upset some players.

When you start Legendary Champions you’re offered to choose one of six different classes, as in most Aeria game’s there’s not much information about each of them in-game. Then you choose gender, face, hairstyle and hair color (lots of colors), then choose a faction and begin playing. In open beta, there’s no tutorial for new players. The graphics you see are of medium quality – this means, characters aren’t that blocky as they could be, but the background is not that shiny and detailed as it could be, either. Overall game looks good enough for 2GB archive, at least, until you move… As in many Asian games, there’s a feature allowing you auto-track NPCs, monsters and places, but in Legendary Champions they went further and made you automatically mount the horse if your destination is far away.

This horse is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen since the “Quarantine” movie! And indeed the worst animated-in-game-anything. It looks like a sick mutant unleashed from some Resident Evil laboratory, not like anything close to a horse (LC modeler and animator haven’t seen even a picture of a horse, i bet), and it’s animated really horrible, the animation don’t even loops, but wildly twitches instead each time it reaches an cycle’s end. Speaking of animations, there are little to none animations in this game, only characters have a few moves, but they can’t even sit or jump. Also, some actions are a bit lagged because of how some animations must start.

The sound is of the same quality as the graphics are. Music isn’t exactly annoying, but sound effects are – when you’re supposed to kill a hundred of enemies, and each of them makes one same sound each time you hit them… Brrrr, it’s a nightmare. Interface of Legendary Champion at first looks a little confusing, but easy enough to grasp. What i hated, is that by default it zooms and fixes camera on whatever i am activating – NPC i talk to, mailbox i use… There’s an option to switch it off, but it didn’t seem to work for me (options are quite buggy right now). The game also automatically use HP/MP potions, which sometimes good, but if you’re low on potions and would rather wait to heal yourself than spend a potion, you can’t do that.

What i hated most, is how combat handled here. Each time you hit someone or they hit you there’s a lot of bright letters and words flowing from around your head, but it’s okay with me, the worst thing is – to imitate fast-paced combat and action, each time you give or take a hit, the camera jumps, shakes and bounces. It made me feel dizzy and sick after half and hour, and i had to take a break. Can you believe that? I had no problems with Half-Life 2 when many people had nausea playing it, and some Chinese mmorpg finally got me at that…

Now, i must mention DotA here. They say, they have a DotA-style combat. Don’t you believe that, they don’t! Its only for people who might have never played DotA, i can’t even call it a clone since the mechanics that make DotA what it is are completely lacking here. I really don’t want to talk about that more.

Now, what about Legendary Champions being “free to play”? There are two kinds of money: gold and silver. Silver you earn in-game, gold you buy from the cash shop. And since i haven’t been playing this game for any prolonged amount of time, i can’t be 100% sure, but from my experience it looks like Legendary Champions can precisely work as a black hole sucking away your money. Every action (even repairs) and item out there which you can buy with in-game money are also available for cash. Badges that you need to upgrade your Champions are also sold for cash, plus, people on the forums say that Legendary Champions is set to slow player progress after lvl30 (i didn’t went that far to see for myself), so i don’t think someone can play this game without putting a lot of money in.

Now, the last few things i want to add. Does this game need a lot of grinding? Is it buggy? Let’s see… Somewhere around lvl5 you’re shown your first Champion – Lancelot. You are ported to an instance (which gives you half an hour to finish it) with a long map full of cloned mobsters and the objective is to get to the other part of the map and save another Champion. Lancelot is super-cool, so he needs only hit once to kill each of the monsters, but there are several hundreds of them between you and the objective. Just click each of them for auto attack, wait for animation, click next… Boring like hell.

  Then, after I’ve spent about ten minutes on it, Lancelot suddenly vanished and left me with my newbie character alone with the hundreds of angry mobs. I think it was a bug, along with several option in the Option menu that didn’t worked too. The game asked a few times after that, if i want to be Lancelot again, i answered yes, but he never came back. The pompous jerk… Anyway, i just ran across the map to its end, getting hit by everything that breathes and drinking HP potions on the way, until I’ve made it to the end. I didn’t even had to kill any of these mobs at all in the end, be it a bug or a game design flow… It was really boring, and due to the repeating glitches meeting other Champions wasn’t fun either.

So, my answer to the question “should i play this game?” – no, i wouldn’t be playing it. There are of course bright things about this game – the graphics are overall not that bad if you shot your horse and don’t look at the animations (would be hard, but still), there are a lot of cool mounts like a giant panda and dinosaur, and the color setting is all bright and shiny, and the Champions idea isn’t that bad (if they ever going to fix it), so there certainly would be people who would like to play - just not me.

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I thought i need a “header post” for the game reviews i’m going to write, so they could be accessible all from this single post besides the tags. Also, i want to state that these reviews aren’t going to be as much covering as, say, these big gaming portals like MMORPG.com write – my goal is not to cover every aspect of a specific game. The site i mentioned above accepts reviews from people who spent at least two weeks per game. But i am a gamer, not a paid game reviewer, and i don’t need to invest two weeks of my life into a game which i, as a gamer, mark bad from the first hour of game play. So when you read this, remember, i write about my gaming experience and games that i liked (or didn’t) – this is a kind of an opinion you would get by asking “is this game worth playing?” at some gaming forum.

Legendary Champions Review: First And Worst Impression
MapleStory Review: The Best Game Ever... For Cheaters & Grind-lovers!
New Facebook game “Zen garden” – a new star or a new fail?
Unusual Games: Faunasphere - an MMO + Facebook crossover
Ace Online / Air Rivals Review: A Breath Of Sci-Fi Air In A Land Of Fantasy Games
Eve Online: Living Another Life (Rather A Personal Story Than An Actual Review)

Divine Souls Review: Open Beta First Impression
Divine Souls: Are Beta Bugs Driving You Crazy too?
Divine Souls: Not All Hope Lost Yet? Divine Souls Is Taken Down Until Critical Issues Are Fixed

Rift: Planes Of Telara – Closed Beta Screenshots – Part 1
Rift: Planes Of Telara – Closed Beta Screenshots – Part 2
RIFT: Planes Of Telara - Closed Beta Screenshots – Part 3


iPad Online Games: Aurora Feint 3 Review
iPad Online Games: Castle Craft Review

Prius Online: Closed Beta First Impression

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Since this blog is really a fresh start (you can check the archives page to see), the first my problem besides writing something interesting for a reader (and constantly checking my spelling), is to let this reader know i exist at all – which is, actually, much harder. So, I've been looking at the usual blogger’s stuff like blogging directories (they suck!), RSS aggregation, social networks (they rule!) and I’ve stumbled upon an unusual network service for bloggers: Entrecard. The main idea is that everyone set up an Entrecard widget on their blog and click each other’s widgets to make Drops, which in turn we can spend on buying ads in someone’s blog – and the whole point of this is rather finding interesting blogs than getting more Drops. And i must say i found a few interesting gaming blogs doing that (now i hope, someone finds mine in the same fashion :)

There are several pro’s and con’s to this system i see after using it for a few days:

- You may get a lot of random, untargeted traffic.
Many people just go through all the widgets they see, clicking them for Drops and not caring what is this blog about – means, these visitors won’t stay to read, but they’ll still show on my statistics.

+ Some of these people still can stay if they get suddenly interested.
I found a few blogs I’d like to keep reading while i didn’t exactly searched for them.

- Some sites remove their widgets and when you give Drops to get an ad on them, you get nothing. You’re supposed to be checking every blog out there, but still this is a cheating.

+ You get full stats on who came to your blog, when and from where. So can visit their blog in return to check if it’s anything interesting to you.

- You can’t usually tell if a blog that has a middle-sized price for ad really get visited that much. Because the price is calculated basing on other things than amount of visitors – so you can put an ad there but no one will see it.

+ There are all kinds of blog categories and prices for everyone. I’m not eager to farm Drops for ads, so I’ll stick for middle-priced ads and see what can i get of it.

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As Gamespot reports today, Fallout Online is supposed to launch beta in the first half of 2012, and then released commercially in the second part of the same year. There’s no screenshots or video available for this game yet, only a promotional web site and a bits of information from the developers. "Fallout 3 was a little bit too serious--that's definitely not where we're going. Our Fallout MMOG will be extremely funny," says Eric Caen. He’s Interplay president, in case you live in a tank. Oh, wait, a little bit too serious? Come on, let’s tell the truth: Fallout 3 is just a clone of TES3: Morrowind in a post-industrial setting! "An MMOG must be a lot deeper than a stand-alone game. It's not a shooting game we're making. You can shoot, but it's a very small portion of the game. The game itself is about reconstructing the world,” says Caen.

I’m actually glad to hear that. I like Bethesda’s Morrowind pretty much, but what they have done to Fallout series i don’t like at all. The whole point of two first Fallout games is all about mocking the 50’s fear of nuclear war. There goes the 50-60’s music on every Fallout, and the ads, and the billboards, and all the black humor. Sure, Fallout 3 was a blast and Bethesda made it into a very popular game, but i’m glad the Fallout Online is made by Interplay again.

And, btw, i already registered for my beta chance!

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Vendetta Online is a 3D space combat MMORPG for Windows, Mac and Linux. This MMO permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws.

A fast-paced, real-time "twitch" style combat model gives intense action, coupled with the backdrop of RPG gameplay in a massive online galaxy. Three major player factions form a delicate balance of power, with several NPC sub-factions creating situations of economic struggle, political intrigue and conflict. The completely persistent universe and detailed storyline add to the depth of immersion, resulting in a unique online experience.

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Between all of the endless Korean and Chinese, umm – let me put it straight - grind feasts, there are some unusual games that are trying the uncharted waters of niche MMO market And by an MMO i mean here a game, that has graphics and some basic structure, where many players can interact at the same time. By this criteria the game by Big Fish Games (a well known developer of casual Facebook games) is an MMO indeed. By any other means… it’s a mix of MMO, casual and artificial life genres (and a-life genre haven’t been seriously played with since Creatures series by Creature Labs/Mindscape), so this is quite a special game i’m going to look at – and it’s called Faunasphere.

So, what do we have here? From the MMO genre there are world divided on gaming zones, in which players can interact with each other, a trading system, a friends list, quests, crafting and of course grinding, there’s never a game without some grinding these days. From the casual genre we see browser-based client (i.e. no installing prior to playing), bright flash graphics (that reminds of me of Dofus, btw) and Facebook integrity, which means you can spam people’s walls with your animals and doings. And, the last but not least aspect of the game – its a-life part.

Faunasphere worlds consists of different cubes (earth, water, gas, sand, trash, etc.), that had been put together in something like flying islands, connected with portal. The player has his own islands which can be decorated and expanded by cubes and items gathered in the gaming zones. Interaction with the world goes through Fauna – many different pet creatures who you need to feed, play with and care about, plus they can breed! There’s a whole bunch of different Fauna breeds and besides levels and abilities they also have a parameter such as “genes”. This is where information about how creature’s look and abilities is coded in, there are recessive and dominant genes (just like in real life), and you can breed your Faunas on will to get the exact look or ability you need it to have. For an additional payment you can get “decoded” DNA of your Fauna so you can see what to await from its siblings.

 

The main gameplay consists of you telling your Fauna where to go and travelling along the world zones, where you can gather everything that is not nailed down to the background – gather world cubes, dig out plants, take fruits from trees and receive money, experience and special egg points for every action you do. The egg points sum up for every creature and as soon as the number gets high enough, the Fauna would lay an egg with 1 gene in it. Then you need a second adult Fauna to give a 2nd gene to it, and voila – there’s a new baby with genes from the both of its parent!

Now, to the grinding structure. The gameplay means you must go around and gather things, and kill monsters (which appear in form of cubes too), and do it over and over. But here comes in the developer’s experience in social gaming, where a gap between player’s doings and a reward he gets for them – i.e. between those times when a player sees his actions is giving out some results - is much smaller than in “normal” online games. There’s no way you’re going to gather hundreds of items (like in some Korean grind feasts) until something good happens and you see a rewarding experience that makes you resume the playing – no, there’s always something going on in Faunaspere to keep your attention.

Crafting system is also unusual. To create something at your islands, you first need to but an Idea of this item. Then you place the Idea where you want this item to be and put into it different items and pieces of food – for each Idea there’s an assortment of stuff you need for it “to get real”. If you put a Tree Idea, you need a fruit for it to get real into a tree. After several harvests the tree would die, but you’ll have more fruits to plant more trees. You also can built other things which would give you a steady income or some bonuses to your Fauna.
For example, you can build a Totem that will produce stuff. You can’t use this stuff by  yourself, but other players can buy it from you and use to get bonuses for themselves (these things used to build mega-structures for every player out there, and taking part in the building grants you tickets, which you can trade for valuable prizes), and if some player happen to buy from you several times he becomes a Patron to you, which gives you bonuses in turn (looks like a piece of social gaming again, a reason to get more friends into the game).

I must also mention that the game runs on a mixed “free to play” with “pay to play” model, in this particular case it means micro-transactions rather than on a separate cash shop, plus you can subscribe for small amount of money to get more Fauna slots and a fixed amount of points to spent in-game. The points are used for buying a variety of stuff in-game, that is mixed with things you can buy for game money. The cool thing is that you can get points not only by buying them for real money, but also by selling stuff to other players who are eager to spend their points like that.

Now, to the technical part. Client loading time is quite short comparing to other browser-based games, and it’s also went through some decent optimization, i.e. even while there’s a lot of items and Faunas on the screen it won’t slow down significantly, and there is no loading times between the game zones. Graphics are quite nice, with pre-rendered backgrounds and dynamically drawn character made out of little pieces. The animating is rather nice and smooth too, looks fine to me. There are sounds, music and even voice acting in this game, and it doesn’t makes you feel like you should drown your speakers ASAP. The interface is simple and could be put hidden like a “Start” in Windows does. There’s also an detailed intro for new players like in a good social Facebook game out there. Ah, and you also can’t die at all – if you’re beaten up, your Fauna just goes back home all tired and sad.

Overall, on my taste, the game is unusual and quite interesting, especially for the younger audience. Big Fish Games has a lot of experience on social games and their support, and this particular game seems to be running rather smooth, because it was released back in March 2009 and is still upgraded with new stuff and bug fixes, almost each week or two.

Updade as of March, 2011: Faunasphere has been closed and no longer available now :(((

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