DCUO Beta Journal Follow Up

I deleted the beta for DC Universe Online a few days before Christmas. I didn't do this because the game is bad or anything. No, if you've read my first beta journal you'll understand that I quite enjoy this game and I plan on buying it eventually. I deleted it simply because it was taking up a massive 18 gigs of my hard drive space. I'm worried that when the actual game comes out next month that I won't have enough space on my 40 gig HDD to play the game. Not with all the other games I currently play or plan on playing. Here's hoping there isn't a mandatory install (though there probably will be) and that the game opts to stream mostly off the blu-ray disk.

Last time I wrote about this beta I talked about character creation and a few of the things I liked about the combat and mission structure. I was going to write a bit about the instanced PvP sessions but unfortunately I couldn't get connected to anything other than the main part of the beta. I don't know what the problem was.

The problem I mentioned last time about how small and unreadable text in menus and chat screens is has been addressed but the stability of the game as a whole could still use some work.

I know this update has been short but now that I'm playing other games and not this beta I just don't have as much to say about it. I'm not picking this game up next month either. My January title is going to be Dead Space 2 but after a while these DCUO Journals will continue with the full game.

Flight Control HD: If Tetris Had A Baby With Flight Simulator

Flight Control HD is like stepping into a jet-liner in the early 1960's. A cute, shapely stewardess ushers you into the cabin of the chrome-clad fuselage. Inside the air is fresh and cool, the seats are plush and capacious, Brubeck jazzes out lightly from the speakers above, and in the back a slick-haired suit shakes up icy cocktails. Finding your seat, you relax, sip your drink, and enjoy the ride.

Holidays and games part 2

Today we have a treat (or not depends on how you feel about the book) for all of our Jewish readers. Hershel and the Hanukkah goblins by Eric Kimmel and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman will always have a place in my heart. While I'm not Jewish, it was one of my earliest exposures to Hanukkah and it had goblins.

Braid, or "the ingenuous platformer wrapped in a strange and brooding relationship narrative"

Tis "the season"! While some of your friends here at NAC! will be dishing out festive holiday-themed writeups, I have more of my typical fare in store for you. I was lucky enough to have been gifted the Humble Indie Bundle 2 this year by Spooky's better half. Amongst the awesome independently developed games jammed into this pay-what-you-want-jam-pack, one title really stuck out to me: Braid.

Holidays and games part 1.

In 1984, just in time for the holiday season Rimbot Games released Silent Night Deadly Night on the Atari 2600. The game is based on the popular slasher flick released in the same year. In this retro classic you play as Denise, a girl who just wanted to have sex with her boyfriend Tommy on Christmas eve. But a noise has interrupted their fun time, thinking it was the cat she goes to investigate. Is that Santa Claus? Nope Denise, that's Billy a crazed killer and you've been naughty, RUN!

DCUO Beta Journal 12/17/2010

So, my original intent was to play some DC Universe Online and write multiple updates over the course of my time spent with the game. I ended up getting incredibly engrossed and spending more and more time playing my Hero to the point I forgot to even write an update. I'm now level 18. The level cap for the beta is currently level 20. I have played a lot of this game and there is still lots more to do. This article will be spent detailing character creation and my first impressions of the beta. I haven't played a villain yet so I can't get into that and I'll save it for another update.

The game opens with an awesome heroes versus villains cinematic that you may or may not have seen before. It's pretty epic. I've embedded it below. Take that into your eye sockets. Enjoy.

Again it happens?!

Yes, Virginia, there is inconsistency! I'll be pushing Evolution Of Gaming back again for a couple reasons. But before I explain why I would like to thank everyone on the site and the readers for riding with me on my schizophrenic article tour. I plan out all of these article and then other ideas pop up or something else comes up that I feel is relevant and want to mention.

Parasite Eve, are you going to become Square's next bitch?

Parasite Eve is a video game series that is based off of a book with the same title. The series is quirky and kind of unsettling. Parasite Eve 1 was mostly a Japanese RPG with an awesome battle system. It was a pseudo real time system that allowed you to dodge enemy attacks and then when you make actions, it pauses everything until you finish it. It truly was one of the best battle systems for a PS1 RPG. While Parasite Eve 2 decided to borrow the system from the Resident Evil games, and this angered many fans. However, doing this actually made the game a bit more scary, since the first one was definitely not very scary at all.

Treasure hunting has never been so easy!

You don't even have to sail across the seven seas but you still might have to fight THE KRAKEN! Steam, Valve's digital game store/game manager, is a bastion of great deals. Every week they have a mid-week sale and from Friday to Monday they always have an even better sale. For holidays they have salse that would put The Outrageous Audio Guy to shame. (Check that out two links in the same paragraph, have to keep you rabid monkeys entertained some how.) It's usually a different set of games on sale every day for X days during the gift giving season. Last year leading up to Christmas they would have a rotating door of games that were slashed in price, my girlfriend got me Borderlands for thirty three bucks last year. This was two months after it had come out and it was still at a fifty dollar price tag. Now I know I'm sounding like a shill talking Steam up and yeah maybe I am but this years sale is pretty interesting and has already caused some controversy.

Knightfell for it.

Tearing my hair out trying to learn to code NAC's future web framework hasn't left me with a lot of time to play the games I would like to play. Epic Mickey came out last month, so my Nintendo Wii is just begging to be played. I would love to finish up Blue Dragon on the 360, but my early unit is exhibiting some of the notorious defects from which Xbox 360 has made its name, so Shu and pals are going to have to wait.

I have resorted to picking through what I consider to be the proverbial leftovers of my gaming selection. When the Google webapp store was launched last week, I thought that I'd see what browser-based games their infrastructure was supporting. I knew that this meant I'd probably be wading through a sea of super uninteresting casual games, but I took the chance knowing that neither time nor finances were working in my favor. Namco's Knightfall: Death and Taxes caught my eye. It was quick to load, seemed to have decent production value for a webgame, and was apparently free!

This screen cap is more interesting than the actual cutscenes. Yeah, that bad.

I Never Knew Hunting Dinosaurs Can be So Much Fun!

Monster Hunter is a 3rd person action adventure title that focuses on, unsurprisingly, monster hunting. This game is very difficult to get into as it truly is a skill based console game. The requirement of knowing the larger monsters attack patterns, and the strengths/weaknesses of your weapon set, make the difficulty to new players astronomical. If you are just getting in to this game with one of the newer titles, be prepared to be frustrated since you are going to need to fight the same monster over and over again just to get better. Its just that kind of cycle this game has.

Dressed to Digress: Tux Gaming, "Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers"

Searching for sustainable gaming within the perilous digital wilderness that is Linux. Amidst open source, black pants studio's Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers is an encouraging beacon of hope.

Super Meat Boy Review: You Might Never Beat This Meat.

That middle column breaks... and you die.

Super Meat Boy isn't just a "tough as nails platformer" like its description says. No, in fact I'm certain that if this game were a living, breathing entity, it would murder you. It would beat you to death, drag you through the streets and then throw your body into the spinning blades of a saw mill. It would do this to you over and over again until there was nothing left and it would laugh maniacally as it committed this heinous crime in front of everyone. I'm not understating this. This game is brutally difficult and... I love it.

You may not have ever heard of Spooky Games but after this you'll wish you had.

For almost twenty years a small company has produced more than a handful of RPGs, action RPGs, shooters, action, online fantasy and even a couple dating sims. Spooky games had a humble beginning in a small office that could barely hold it's six original employees.

Fission Mailed Stache!

So for the past two weeks I have been focusing on gaming and school... Mostly gaming, which is a good thing right? So in other words, I have not had time to be able to provide articles and what-not due to thanksgiving and, like I said before, school... Its the week before finals, and instead of using every second I have studying for them I decide to explain what I have been up to for the past two weeks!

Since there was a Steam sale last week, I bought a few games for super cheap. I ended up buying Kane and Lynch 2, and Recettear: An item Shop's Tale with a few others but I really only cared about the latter. They were each 5 bucks, which was a good deal in my opinion and both of them are not bad at all.

Here are my thoughts: