Aleph Ersatz

PLEASE SEE MY OTHER POST ABOUT LoL AND IGNORE THIS ONE.

http://leagueoflegends.com/

League of Legends is the next version of Defence of the Ancients (DotA), a game which combines team play, soloing and other tactics in a Diablo-style tower defence game.  LOL has many aspects of Demigod combined with the art style of Warcraft 3, creating a smooth but deep gameplay.  It’s also a free-to-play game, with some items being unlocked by playing more, and others by purchasing online points to spend.

The gameplay itself is clean, functions well, does not lag much for me and is easy to work with.  However, the login and setup screens are a bit clunky, especially once entering a game, which can make it a pain.  Rounds themselves only last 20 - 40 minutes at most, but a huge kicker is that once in a game, you can’t quit out.  This is great of you get disconnected, but ultra shitty if you want to leave because the game is going down the tubes.  The offset, of course, is you game experience for winning or losing, and a decent amount for both.  So even sucking up a round isn’t a huge waste.

The other huge kicker is the game has a nasty learning curve.  There is the wonderful option to play pactice games with others, but learning exactly how to setup a champion takes a bit of work, and there are 20+ champtions to choose from!  The wekely rotation of unlocked champions is a good idea, though, so long as you don’t get too attached to one.  Gives you a chance to learn new champs and cycle the game play for a while.  Plus, you can buy any champ with game-play points, or buy the collector physical box to unlock them all!  Not bad for $30.

All in all, it’s a decent game with plenty of replay, multiplayer team based, and rewards for winning or loosing.  The single-game at a time and learning curves are going to be major turn offs for some people, but for others it is just part of the gameplay.  And being free to play the whole game, it is totally worth downloading and trying!

My account there is AlephErsatz, feel free to add me as a friend if you join.

That’s right, game’s, I’ve been playing them!  Or at least trying demos.

Tired the demo for the over-hyped Left 4 Dead 2.  While I’m a fan of Left 4 Dead, 2 doesn’t offer all that much more in the way of “new features”, just some new faces, voices and terrain.  The whole addition of melee weapons takes away from the dual pistol logic, pretty much cripling any interest I had in it.  Sure, a frying pan is fun to wahck zombies with, but what about being able to use a Mag Pistol and  Frying Pan?  Why do I have to sacrifice a pistol that is vastly supperior to half of the starting weapons for a stupid melee?  Why do I need limited ammo?  C’mon guys!

I have the beta of League of Legends, but have not played it yet.  Looks like a decent RTS game, with some fun multiplayer, I just have not started it up yet.  The beta is free to pay, so I’m sold on that for the time being.  The website feels far too much like a korean MMO right now, but that’s fine because most korean MMOs are actually rather fun, even if rediculously hard on the leraning curve.

Have my eyes set on Tortchlight in the near future.  $20 for a Diablo-clone by the same guys that made Diablo?  What’ not to love there?  Mayb be a single-player game, but for that price, a self-distributed game is probably well worth it.  I’ve heard many good reviews of it, and I’m hoping it holds up.  I’m a huge fan of Diablo, and with luck this litte pck-me-up will be just the thing I need while I’m waiting for Diablo III to show it’s ugly face in 2011.

I have tried 3 times to download the Mod verion of Dino D-Day, with no luck.  It is supposedly a HL2 mod and soon-to-be-full-game where you fight Nazi Dinosaurs.  (For anyone who has seen Idiocracy, this should not be a new concept)  The demo video looked fun but I have given up trying to download it for now.  I just cannot get an installer that works!  Maybe sometime in the future, when I feel the need to punch a T-Rex in the face, I will try again.

Lastly, I found out about a Startcraft AI competition.  Seems that this game just will not die!  Several APIs exist for developing bots for the existing game, adding on their own AI dlls to play against.  A very nifty concept and impressiv for a 10+ year old game.  Expressive Intelligence Studio is holding an AI competition with a dealine of September 2010 for entries.  They promote using something called the BroodWar API for programming it.  It’s a nifty and pretty straight-forward way to interface with the game, and allows anyone with basic C++ knowledge to easily work with the game and programming.  They are also working on a LUA interface for scripting that way too.

I’ve been poking at the BW API just a little and have decided I am going to go as far as making an AI that builds a basic base, and sends a single group of units to attack.  That’s all I want to do because making a proper AI is way way to hard.  Now if anyone wants to try and start a team to develop a SC AI, then I’d be glad to help, but by myself I just do not have the time, motivation, or knowledge to make a working, let alone competative level, AI for SC.

I have found a wodnerful site for tracking one’s anime and manga lists: http://www.myanimelist.net

I have disabled the Otaku List subpage off of this site and am switched over to using hat website instead.

You can check out my new pages here:

Anime List

Manga List